Big Rupert Murdoch sez that once he starts charging subscriptions for his online media, he’s gonna block Google from accessing his sites content. (ie. remove stories from Google search index). This implies that content from sites such as The Sun, The Times and the Wall Street Journalwill not show up in our search results thus encouraging people to pay for online content. He’s also gonna lobby so that other online news media pursue the same strategy. This means that eventually, if things pan out the way he plans, Google search results will be poorer thus undermining the value of the search engine, and Google’s business value. In recent months, Murdoch and his boyz stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of “kleptomania” and acting as a “parasite” for including News Corp content in its Google News pages. Murdoch has been turned off by the open access to information that currently exists in the www as well as by the fact that his inet acquisition MySpace has struggled in the face of competition from Facebook in recent years, and is due to fall short of its targets in a lucrative search deal with Google – a slip that could cost the site more than $100m in payments from the internet advertising giant. Some critics of this strategy claim that Murdoch has got the wrong handle on internet business and doesn’t understand that search engines enhance the value of web sites like the WSJ through
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improved traffic, implying more revenue through advertising. Murdoch they say clings to the old subscription model instead of developing his business through ad based revenue. On the other hand, this simple but intriguing strategy may just work (as it did in Korea) and may put the content holder in the driver’s seat. I mean Google currently forges contacts (through online ads etc..) with content holders so that Google gets a piece of the pie on a per click basis. If some other search engine comes around and gives the content holder a better deal (perhaps less charges on a per click basis) then this content holder’s engine may be allowed to show site results while thus enhancing the engine’s value – on a per segment basis – and undermining Google’s current leadership position in the search engine business. In other words sell your content/business to the highest – or most attractive- bidder. So we may have search engine segmentation and not a universally applicable search engine. We may also see a search engine for search engines (one step up in the information chain) ! Interesting strategy and interesting tactics (actually ingenious) for the relentless drive for market share.
Mr. Murdoch’s point of view coupled with the EUs latest decisions on information piracy reflect a trend towards slowly restricting access to internet freebies such as information and material protected by intellectual copyright. Time will tell whether these strategies pay off, or provide fertile ground for new, more aggressive business disruption methods and mechanisms.
The EU decided to propose a law that would terminate internet access to any EU citizen that is accused of downloading software that violates intellectual property rights, without prior legal process. In other words you’re guilty before proven innocent. Paradoxically, last May, the EU parliament decided that every EU citizen has the fundamental right to have access to the internet (universal access) sort of like every Canadian has the fundamental right to have access to universal Medicare. The amendment caused swift reaction from French deputies who reminded the EU parliament (whose deputies seem to have succumbed to the will of the EU
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commission which probably succumbed to some other lobby groups’ will) that similar legislation in France was deemed unconstitutional by the French High Court, and now required a legal process before any citizen is disconnected from internet access (ie. proven guilty before any action taken). The proposed law will apply (if it receives a majority vote in the EU parliament) beginning 2010 which means that the member countries will have about 18 months to embody the law in their national legal framework.
The EU also proposed a new “Telecommunication Package” that includes the following highlights:
• A subscriber can change to a different operator within a day with number portability
• A service contract can have a maximum of two years duration • Service operators must inform NRAs about subscriber information confidentiality violations
• A minimum quality of service must be guaranteed at the signing of any subscriber-service operator service contract.
• NRA position is strengthened with greater independence and a new body called BEREC is created to ensure healthy competition.
• Measured to ensure regional internet broadband access growth
NSN is planning on cutting about 7700 workers from its 64000 strong workforce. This amounts to about 8% of the total workforce and will save NSN about 500M euro per annum up until the end of 2011. This decision marks a second wave of job slashing in the last two years.
The joint venture between Nokia Oyj and Siemens AG in 2008 resulted in about 15% workforce reduction which was a result amongst other things of duplication elimination and product line pruning/rationalization.
NSN market share fell to 20% in the second quarter of 2009 while the equivalent share in 2008 was 26%.
NSN announced an operational loss of 53M euro in the third quarter mainly due to the continuing infrastructure supply war between NSN, LM Ericsson and Huawei Technologies.
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Every once in a while we have the opportunity witness mechanisms of change at work and invoking disruption mechanisms whose after-effects are felt long after. For example, Apple first entered the mobile arena with the iPhone and rather audaciously prohibited subsidies and demanded revenue sharing from Mobile Network Operator (MNO) partners in exchange for iPhone exclusivity. Nonetheless operators eagerly queued at Apple’s doorstep and iPhone became know as ‘the tail wagging the dog’.
Article by : Jason Nikolaou
The latest such bold movement comes from the Machine-to-Machine (aka M2M) industry and its encounters with the telco world. In fact there are two such prominent examples and since they share much in common we can treat both examples as a unique – albeit disruptive – trend which challenges the status quo and re-shuffles the cards regarding the modus operandi of the telecom world.
Amazon recently announced an International version of its e-reader, the Kindle, available from October the 19th. Amazon already offers Kindle’s Wireless connectivity for free -“No monthly wireless bills or commitments”- in a mobile data wholesale agreement with US operator Sprint and preloads its device with an integrated Sprint SIM card. For its international edition Kindle has been equipped with an AT&T SIM card to enjoy the international roaming capability that the ubiquitous GSM & UMTS networks offer. So for a purchase price of $259 customers of Amazon’s Kindle international edition will be able to connect wirelessly for certain content shopping and downloading services -Free-of-Charge – within 100 countries. Further services include access to Wikipedia and for a monthly subscription fee, Newspapers and Magazines. Amazon’s customers can purchase books on Kindle for $9.99 and download them for free wherever they are within 100 specified countries. Essentially what Amazon has achieved, as far as the end user is concerned, is to bypass the international Roaming costs. Amazon has leveraged its volume of sales in an agreement with AT&T to provide connectivity and global roaming at a price that Amazon can afford to offer to its users Free-of-Charge.
On the other hand Garmin the world’s biggest producer of on-board GPS navigation systems has teamed up with KPN to enable them to offer enhanced navigation experience by including ‘Real-time services’. Their latest navigation product ‘nüvi 1690’ will be capable of receiving real time data services such as traffic & weather updates, fuel prices, etc. Mobile data connectivity will be provided by an integrated SIM from KPN. The service will be initially available in 15 countries and for a price of $500 users can enjoy two years of data services and roaming between the 15 countries.
Similar to the Amazon’s example, Garmin has put its weight behind the agreement convincing KPN to provide mobile data connectivity and roaming within 15 countries at a price they can ‘afford’ to give Free-of-Charge to their customers as a service within the price of the product.
These two examples of telco & M2M interaction highlight two important considerations. On the one hand the international Roaming Pricing model seems like a medieval castle under siege. Holding on to and relying on walled gardens and legacy pricing models is unwise, and even cash cows don’t go on producing ‘milk’ for ever. Sooner or later some formidable player (e.g. Amazon or Garmin or the EU) will challenge your pricing policy and force you to change.
Secondly, what both AT&T & KPN have in common - down the value chain of ‘wholesale mobile data & roaming’ – is that they share a common partner. Both have teamed up with Jasper Wireless to provide ‘Connectivity Management Platform’ customized for operation of M2M devices. In effect what both KPN & AT&T have done by collaborating with the third party vendor is to differentiate themselves from the competition and give added value to their offering, making it more appealing for M2M operators. They are not only offering Global Coverage but also flexible billing applications and out-of-the-box services. They have enabled their network to host any M2M operator who can embed pre-activated SIM cards in its devices and through the Connectivity Management Platform running on the host MNO benefit from custom device provisioning, instant activation, real-time diagnostic tools and detailed billing and usage reports.
KPN & AT&T did not just sit and wait for M2M to come along, hoping it would be another success as SMS was in the ‘90s. The operators conscientiously were proactive in choosing the right partner that would allow them to add ‘intelligence’ to their network uplifting them from a bit-pipe type of positioning.
The field of M2M partnership is still green, there may still be growth for those who chose to move and change fast.
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I bought the Samsung LE 32A656ALCD TV about 4 months ago.
About a month ago the screen started “whistling“. The sound resembles something like ghosts in the TV, or a breeze passing through the TV screen.
I called customer support here in Athens and they told me that this sound is usual under normal 32 inch LCD screen operating conditions. I find that hard to believe knowing something about normal operating conditions and bias currents.
I checked some other similar TVs and screen operation was smooth;no sound.
Does anybody know what the problem could be?
The TV is operating under factory preset conditions adapted to the local market.
Palm Beach billionaire and philanthropist Jeffry Picower, described as the biggest beneficiary of Bernard Madoff’s fraud, died on Sunday after he was found lying at the bottom of the pool at his home, police said. Police were investigating the death of the 67-year-old investor as a drowning, local media reported. Picower was pulled unconscious from the pool of his multimillion-dollar oceanside home, called Casa del Sud, by his wife and a housekeeper. He was later pronounced dead, the Palm Beach Post reported quoting police and Fire Rescue officials. Picower and his wife, Barbara, were friends of Wall Street financier Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence after pleading guilty to running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme. The trustee handling the Madoff fraud case, Irving Picard, said in court documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York late last month that Picower, newly listed as one of the 400 wealthiest Americans by Forbes magazine, was complicit in the fraud. Part of Picard’s filing said: “Based upon the trustee’s investigation to date, Picower was the biggest beneficiary of Madoff’s scheme, having withdrawn either directly or through the entities he controlled more than $7.2 billion of other investors’ money.” Picower was being sued for the $7.2 billion, $2 billion more than the trustee in the case demanded in May. The Palm Beach Post reported he was not breathing when he was pulled from the pool and paramedics worked unsuccessfully for 20 minutes at the scene to try to revive him. Local WPTV quoted the Palm Beach fire chief as saying he was told by Picower’s wife and housekeeper that the elderly investor had gone swimming in the pool of his house and that 15 minutes later they found him lying at the bottom. Marcia Horowitz, a spokeswoman for the Picowers’ attorney William Zabel, said the family was devastated by the loss. “Mr Picower did have health issues. He suffered from Parkinsons disease and did have heart-related medical issues,” she said.
MADOFF FRAUD DEVASTATED WEALTHY COMMUNITY
Madoff found many investors for his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme in the wealthy Palm Beach community where he also had a home, since seized along with other assets. The collapse of the scheme last December devastated families and charitable foundations in the sunny beachside playground, one of America’s richest towns. The scandal led to a number of suicides among participating investors. In December, Frenchman Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, co-founder of money manager Access International, was found dead with his wrists slashed, reportedly distraught over losing up to $1.4 billion in client money to Madoff’s fraud. In February, a former British soldier, William Foxton, 65, killed himself after losing his life savings in the scheme. Picower was listed 371st and worth $1 billion on the latest published Forbes list. He started out as an accountant and lawyer and then made money investing in the medical sector. He and his wife headed a philanthropy, the Picower Foundation. The foundation closed when the Madoff fraud unraveled last December. A spokeswoman for Zabel, the Picowers’ attorney, has rejected Picard’s accusations against Picower as “false and outrageous claims … based on a misreading of the purported ‘facts’.” She said the Picowers initiated discussions to reach a settlement with the trustee, who is winding down Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. Picard, who is leading a global search under the Securities Investor Protection Act to recover money for thousands of defrauded investors, has collected about $1.5 billion, but has sued for some $15 billion. The case is Irving H. Picard, trustee for the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC v. Jeffry M. Picower 09-01197 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
(Reporting by Pascal Fletcher and Grant McCool, editing by Chris Wilson)
The Dark Press :- You figure he was a Bryan Jones copycat ?
Nokia decided to sue Apple over Iphone patent infringements. Nokia claims that the Iphone architecture is based upon 10 different Nokia patents, technology that is used without any granted permissions from Nokia. The lawsuit was submitted to the Delaware district court and claims that Nokia has granted right of use to about 40 different companies, companies that include a number of major mobile terminal manufacturers. Nokia claims that Apple is NOT one of those manufacturers and the Iphone is not one of those terminals that has been granted the necessary licences to use the Nokia technology.
Apple announced net profit at 1,67 BUSD for its current fiscal year which closed on the 26th of September. The reason for the impressive earnings lies in increased turnover both in its PC and Iphone business segments. This means that Apple’s 4rth term profits are about 47% higher than last year while revenue is up a walloping 25% at 9,87 BUSD.
In June Apple rolled out the 3GS Iphone which it brought to the market at an initial retail price of 99 USD leading to 7, 4 M units been sold between June and September.
Within its overall strategic framework, Apple slashed iPod prices and incorporated the move its overall “back to school” campaign alongside the sales of the popular Apple Mac. Mac sales increased 17% in the quarter while 10,2 M iPods were sold. Apple foresees next quarter earnings between 11,3 BUSD and 11,6 BUSD.
Apple stock value has doubled in the last couple of months, and went up a further 7% in the last 24 hours.
The success of Apple’s overall retail strategy further testifies to the fact that the market for mobile communication devices is showing characteristics similar to those of retail computing markets, and thus requires a different approach as per traditional telecommunication positioning.
In 2008 Microsoft reduced the remuneration of its top management by about 29% and has frozen wages for 2010. The reason is of course the global financial crisis. Microsoft has also announced staff reductions of about 5000 as a response to a slowdown in business for 2009 of about 3% (14,6B USD in 2009, 17,7B USB in 2008).
Nokia announced 559M Euro losses (for the first time in a decade) due to a 20% reduction in mobile handset business caused by consumers’ preference of the AppleIphone rather than the NokiaN97 Smartphone. The latter losses include a one time investment expense towards NSN which further implies that Nokia plans to discontinue any further investment to NSN.
The green revolution is making its way into the mobile communications business (aside from recyclable materials) through sun power cellular phones. Solar cell phones could build on the economic advantages that mobile phones have already brought to far-flung regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, including price transparency and more accurate and timely information.
Also, thanks to Intel, Apple and Cisco, broadband mobile communication just became simpler through Wi-Fi Direct. Mobile operators have greeted this concept with reserved enthusiasm, and this puts further pressure on classical telecom infrastructure suppliers who still support in the basic architectures the 80-20% business model (more traffic implies more base stations). Specifically the new technology may impact or render obsolete the present Bluetooth technology. This supports our previous premise that ad hoc networking will eventually become mainstream and will replace the classical 80-20% business model which is still embedded in mobile architectures. And while were on the subject of radio pollution, Asef has issued an open statement warning citizens to restrict their mobile phone (or any other radio propagation based communication device) usage for health reasons. Asef claims that there is still no proof on mobile phone usage is detrimental to one’s health (the technology hasn’t been around, on mass deployment (recall 80 – 20 business model) long enough) but nevertheless recommends that citizens take a prudent approach to mobile phone usage. It goes without saying that one day a Nobel prize will be awarded to the individual or team that discovers a “green” way to telecommunicate wirelessly , a way that does not necessarily increase the medium’s (radio or otherwise) density proportionally to the traffic density requirements.
Finally, Joost seems to have the right idea since all indications show that the market is going towards a converged infrastructure for entertainment and communication. In 1995, genius marketer Scott Zakarin convinced his crew to create a tv series that would be only broadcast through the www. With the advent of IP, fiber optics and better broadband coding techniques communication and entertainment are converging on a common platform and in no time at all we will be using common type of infrastructure and terminals for our entertainment and communication, the terminal resembling our pc, and the infrastructure being the internet (or a close relative).
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and Palm Inc stepped up efforts to bolster their smartphone line-ups, as the tech industry’s key players increasingly move to challenge Apple Inc’s popular iPhone.
In a flurry of announcements on Tuesday ahead of the holiday shopping season, the companies introduced new phones, wireless carrier partnerships and efforts to boost the availability of new applications for the phones.
The moves underscore the extent to which the smartphone market has emerged as a prime battleground encompassing a variety of technology businesses and one of the few markets experiencing rapid growth in a rough economic environment.
“Everyone wants to build up and bolster their smartphone portfolio, because that’s what drives more dollars for the carrier and that’s where the market is going,” said Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton.
Google, the world’s largest Internet search company, said it was teaming up with Verizon Wireless to co-develop multiple phones based on its Android operating system. They plan to bring two phones to market this year, and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said the partnership could result in the introduction of multiple devices per year going forward.
The partnership with Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc, is a boost for Google’s efforts to gain a foothold in the smartphone market.
It caps a string of Android phone announcements, including Motorola Inc’s recent introduction of the Cliq phone and HTC’s Hero phone, slated for U.S. release next week.
Google does not charge a licensing fee for Android but hopes to benefit by serving highly targeted mobile ads to users.
Microsoft, whose software is used in the majority of the world’s PCs, unveiled on Tuesday a new version of its smartphone software, Windows Mobile 6.5, and promised more than 30 new devices with the software would be available in more than 20 countries by year’s end.
According to research firm IDC, smartphones running Microsoft software accounted for 11 percent of the worldwide market in the first half of 2009, compared to 11.7 percent share for Apple’s iPhone and 19.9 percent share for Research in Motion’s Blackberry.
Nokia’s Symbian operating system had the largest share with 46.4 percent share.
IPHONE THE ONE TO BEAT
But analysts say that Apple’s iPhone, despite its modest share of the market, is the product to beat.
“It may not be reflected in the numbers, but everyone is playing catch-up” with Apple, said C.L. King analyst Lawrence Harris.
In addition to the technological innovations ushered in by the iPhone, such as its multi-touch screen, Harris said that Apple is the clear leader when it comes to the software apps created by third-party developers to work with a smartphone.
Apple has 85,000 apps available through its iPhone Apps store.
“The fact that a particular app is available can help drive the purchasing decision,” said Harris.
In a sign of how critical apps have become in the smartphone race, Microsoft also announced the launch of a new marketplace for Windows Mobile applications. And Palm announced it was making its “WebOS” smartphone software more open for outside developers to create applications.
Google said there are more than 10,000 free and paid apps available for Android smartphones.
Verizon Wireless and Google sought to play up the open nature of Android apps compared to the tight control that Apple exercises over its software.
The first Android phones from Verizon Wireless will support the Google Voice software application, which allows consumers to make low-priced international calls and which Apple has yet to approve for its iPhone.
“You either have an open device or not. This will be open and we expect to bring that application to market when we bring the first device out,” said Verizon’s McAdam, referring to Google Voice.
Google has said that Apple rejected Google Voice, while Apple contends it is still evaluating the software, in a high-profile spat that has attracted the attention of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
On Tuesday, AT&T Inc, which has the exclusive rights to the iPhone in the U.S., said it will allow third-party Internet telephone calls to be on the iPhone using AT&T’s third generation network, reversing a previous position to ban such calls due to revenue concerns.
Note also that Verizon’s one of the first to deploy LTE in the Amercas, and the world !
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Sound organization design implies efficient information flow and fluid adaptability to fluctuating market conditions, while simultaneous protection of internal corporate functions.
An organization should not be designed to accomodate corporate personnel. An organization should be designed to bring the corporation closer to the target market. A company that is in touch with dynamic market conditions will succeed, and will employ !
The right organization (which is composed of the right managers) reenforces positively employee motivation by correlating employee instrumentality to high valence organization objectives. Motivated employees are committed employees and committed employees support corporate objectives even during trying times.
Here’s a nice set of slides on fluid corporate communication !
And here’s a rough, simple proposal for a fluid organization :
For the first time, some Eastern non European suppliers have teamed up and are about to become the complete network and services supplier for one of the major local telecom operators. Optical based networks and solution are also under discussion.
This may overshadow the shape of things to come for the rest of Europe.
The major reason for the swap out and break in is a price foulup by the traditional supplier .
Events are beginning to unfold and when completed may set a precedent if not for Europe, at least for the region.
This is an addendum to Paul Krugman’s insightful article “The Climate Cassandras” on environmental economics.
What do Green economics, the digital dividend, digital signatures, e-books and e-readers have in common ?
Depending on a government’s strategy nothing, or everything. If we look at some governments, environmental issues usually fall under the ministry of environment, and the digital dividend (and related communication issues) falls under the ministry of communication, post and transport.
The environment should be the number one priority today. If it does not become the number one priority then were talking about extinction. Don’t believe the crap you hear about technology solving this and technology solving that. At the present rate of change, if the ecosystem goes into a negative spiral we’re gonna be going in a Soylent Green type of mode. Our knowledge will not be at any level to prevent an eventual endogenous extinction level event. It’s just too soon.
So again the environment should be the top priority of all governments. A particular government should forge a strategy that breaks away all Chinese walls that segregate various technologies, and use these technologies in a consistent coordinated way. Today we’re talking about energy preservation systems such as photovoltaic cells, wind generators and hydro electric plants. In addition we’re talking about the digital dividend, e-readers and e-books and e-signatures. First of all we should examine if a particular technology does indeed present an improvement vis-à-vis the older technology. So for example is an e-reader truly more environmental friendly than a traditional book? An e-reader is made from plastic (which comes from hydrocarbons), uses batteries and is so and so energy efficient. A book today can be made from recycled paper, which may originate from trash and old rags (and not trees). A book can be fully recycled. Can an e-reader be fully recycled?
On the other hand a fully electronic office (paperless office including digital signatures; not that simple as per a discussion I had with the head of Silanis a couple of years ago) where we manage to get away from the hydrocarbon base (ie. plastic) and have the same or better plastic type of material generated perhaps from plant life (or totally get away from having a device and somehow use holography to view and process documents) will do wonders when in comes to resource conservation.
The point is that an environmental strategy should itemize, assess, and incorporate under a common umbrella all relevant items (as per our current knowledge) that will drastically help reduce resource consumption and environmental damage. So planting more trees, environmental friendly buildings and cars, telecommunications and e initiatives, energy saving storing and generating technologies etc… should be consolidated under a common strategy and coordinated under an overall project which is aimed at drastically improving/reversing the present environmental decline, as soon as possible.
A notable MBA textbook begins its section on want identification by stipulating that the overall health of our planet is deteriorating, and opportunities will exist for bottled water, medicines, sunglasses and sun shield uniforms and a host of other new business opportunities. Well, if the overall health of the planet continues to deteriorate, and we pursue the marketing process in a Adamsmithian kind of way, yes there will be such opportunities. One opportunity will lead to another and one business will give way to the next, until finally,all businesses will give way to that final great business, the funeral parlor.
Charles Revson said a couple of years ago that “a man has the right to stink as long as the stench does not offend anyone next to him“.
Revlon, Revson’s baby, was the first company that identified the need for male perfumes and deodorants.
-On the other side of town, Tandberg was acquired by Cisco (videohead and all) indicating Cisco’s move up in the services chain (iptv etc..).-
A company has the right to go under even if this company was at one time in the forefront of local communication services, and was known to be first in offering attractive packages and technologies to its subscriber base.
But ok, the company always was in the midst of management turmoil resembling greco-roman wrestling matches and then after the investment funds took over, a bit of this and a bit of that, and after some pepto relief, the former southern european presently northern african company owes a couple of billion euros. And ok, perhaps the fact the debt of the company by years’ end will be about 9 times its EBITDA while EBITDA itself has taken an 18% dive (Belgarion you’re into this accounting stuff;maybe if I provide the figures you can give a qualified assessment).
What ya gonna do ? Ok, so they’ve stopped paying suppliers, downsized in an interesting sort of way, stopped paying some salaries a couple of months now,abandoned their network, and they’re desperately looking for new cash infusions and new management (in other words a buyout;let’s hope that the buyer isn’t in too much debt!) which will do what new management does, get rid of the old management.
What ya gonna do? That’s the environment we’re working in.
I can understand that the co’s in an financial grind. What I don’t understand is why the bills that I, and a number of collegues, are getting have all these billing errors in them? There’s overbilling (never underbilling), and some of the bundled packages that were offered giving discounts in certain services (like a lower monthly fee) are somehow “forgotten” from the bill.
Also, why is it that everytime a particular subscriber tries to change to another operator (the churn rate’s beginning to skyrocket) he meets all this inertia?
And why is it that everytime a particular subscriber cuts her subscription she gets this ugly notice from some lawyer dude about unpaid subscriptions fees, without any hardcopy bill confirming these fees?
And finally, why is it that whenever one goes to a particular shop and and pays her subscription fee, one never gets any change, (if the change is between 1 and 20 cents)?
The only thing that’s accomplished from all this is a dissatisfied customer that will drift to a competitor,a competitor that will use aggressive tactics to capitalize on your deteriorating brand, and alot of pissed off people that will use legal and regulatory action to get justice.
Let’s hope that the winds of change don’t spin outta control and become a self devastating hurricane.
“Wall Street, in these matters, is like a lovely and accomplished woman who must wear black cotton stockings, heavy woollen underwear, and parade her knowledge as a cook because, unhappily, her supreme accomplishment is as a harlot.”
“The Great Crash: 1929“, John Kenneth Galbraith
Reform or Bust -Paul Krugman
In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. At the very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fear of creating a public backlash. But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’s not forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sector is rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Street paychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deploying its political clout to block even the most minimal reforms. The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’s selfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himself is ready, even now, to take on the bankers.
Credit where credit is due: I was delighted when Lawrence Summers, the administration’s ranking economist, lashed out at the campaign the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in cooperation with financial-industry lobbyists, is running against the proposed creation of an agency to protect consumers against financial abuses, such as loans whose terms they don’t understand. The chamber’s ads, declared Mr. Summers, are “the financial-regulatory equivalent of the death-panel ads that are being run with respect to health care.”
Yet protecting consumers from financial abuse should be only the beginning of reform. If we really want to stop Wall Street from creating another bubble, followed by another bust, we need to change the industry’s incentives — which means, in particular, changing the way bankers are paid. What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.
The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness. But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.
I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?” That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts.
Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that. All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seen before: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resembles populist rhetoric. And that’s something he needs to get over. It’s not just that taking a populist stance on bankers’ pay is good politics — although it is: the administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it’s giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money away to Wall Street, and it should welcome the chance to portray the G.O.P. as the party of obscene bonuses. Equally important, in this case populism is good economics. Indeed, you can make the case that reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road. It’s time for the president to realize that sometimes populism, especially populism that makes bankers angry, is exactly what the economy needs.
- The Dark Press : Salesmen get rewarded on short term sales, even if it means loosing long term strategic business. Managers get promoted on their ability to talk, rather that their ability to manage and company share values are usually based on a contiuous stream of income which is judged (and usually far off from what eventually happens) on its short term results. We are a society which judges a book by its cover. Relics such as prudence and patience are nothing more than a subject of epic novels, replaced by daily telenovelitas. Andele !
George Papandreou, the President of Socialist International is now the new Prime Minister of the Hellenic republic.
PASOK demolished the New Democracy party winning 160 seats with a 10% difference. The New Democracy party, the conservative right, reached an all time low of 34% of electorate vote.
The end o’ the world (2012) is gonna have to wait until after the 2016 ’cause were not gonna miss this for the world(didn’t predict that did you, Nostradumass ??) !
By Zeus, we’re gonna be dancin’ some …SSSsssssssssssssssssAMBA!
Greece is a small market. Greece is ranked 2 globally when it comes to mobile growth.
The greek market is an oligopoly insofar as mobile communication is concerned; cosmote/t-mobil, vodafone,windin terms of market share.
Wind has been suffering for some time a cash crunch (due to debt payments) and is desperately seeking refinancing from new investors.
Vodafone smells blood and announces major price cuts and new attractive – according to vodafone -bundled offers/ packages.Vodafone issues a press release saying that it wants to gain market share at all cost, and that it wants to become number one in this market.
Since we’re dealing with an oligopoly such actions are soon followed by the rest of the players. Cosmote will easily meet vodafone’s challenge and perhaps raise the stakes. Wind will….well….whose market share do you think vodafone’s after?
On the other side of things analog tv is slowly being phased out in Greece by command of her majesty the EU, and by 2012 the last analog transmitter will be decomissioned.
There is a strong possibility that information, in the near future, will be stored, managed and maintained in huge information storage facilities.
A particular company will outsource its information needs to one of these facilities, and will not bother with maintaining any storage facilities on site.
This of course implies changes to the IT support facility of the company as to the role of the Chief Information Officer.
These huge storage facilities will of course give strong guarantees of information confidentiality, security, and reliability and will probably also maintain Chinese walls in order to avoid security breeches between corporate accounts.
Of course such facilities require a fair amount of work when it comes to architectures, database modeling and security infrastructure as well as some sort of information component architecture where perhaps the critical components of a company’s information are still maintained within the corporate facilities, and the bulk of the remaining information, information that’s memory consuming but deemed non critical in terms of business and operational performance, within the confines of the storage facility.
Needless to say a lot of work for engineers, computer scientists and lawyers.
Sort of similar to the way electricity is distributed today. In the past each building generated its own power. When the electrical companies were formed, the task of power generation was outsourced to these companies and houses today get their power from these companies. Of course in special cases, onsite backup systems exist to ensure a continuous supply of power when something goes wrong with the shared power network.
Also, when you have independent companies supplying you with something, there’s always danger of speculative activity as the state of California found out when stockbrokers and Enron companies were selectively cutting power grids in order to offer power to the state at premium rates. But then that’s why we have government and regulatory bodies.
Speaking of crime, we were informed of a shooting rampage in the Mexico City subway. Evidently this guy was spray painting statements against the government. When the cops tried to stop him, he started shooting at them. After killing two policemen he hid in a subway train. The police finally nabbed him. I wonder if he’ll ever make it to trial?
Sad thing to see crime out of control in one of the most enchanting capitals of the world, a place where Maria Callas gave one of her last concerts.
Let’s talk about that part of the economic surplus that’s attributed to the mobile communication industry.
If we focus on Europe, in the past a good portion of this surplus went to those that supplied the various elements that were required to provide such a service : manufacturers, suppliers, sub contractors, retailers etc… The service was defined by premium prices and service providers were few. Then competition on the service side (more operators;new ways of communicating like internet communication) and supply end (more suppliers; say from the far east) started coming in. In addition regulatory measures ensured that a good portion of this surplus was allocated to the consumer through lower phone charges, for example when it came to global roaming, fixed to mobile, mobile to mobile etc…
So classical service provider revenue started going down (mostly willingly through attractive packages, free SMS, free voice minutes etc…) and the squeeze (since shareholders still expected returns even though a lot of these shareholders are mobile customers who want lower prices per minute, but higher share prices) was carried along the value chain including supplier price squeezing etc.. Now all this did not result in any change in the social surplus; the wealth redistribution and the necessary changes brought about a new industry equilibrium; in other words above normal profits started becoming normal profits. As a matter of fact, regardless of who had a bigger piece of the surplus, society benefited as whole from all aspects including financial (a new source of investment wealth), health (mobile e-health), business (e-commerce), socializing, and security (your car broke down on 635 E from Forth Worth to Dallas at 3 AM; mobile 911 with location based services etc…). Sure, some contracts were renegotiated but so what? Employment was steady if not increasing and service continued to improve !
Indeed mobile communication made our lives better.
In some countries, it even resulted in much better fixed phone service.
The coming of the crisis meant a major change in economic surplus.
Wealth was destroyed and the telecom sector suffered in all areas (the world economy suffered but we’re limiting our discussion to the mobile communication arena). A number of players from all parts of the value change started having economic and viability problems, and unemployment increased a lot!
The Greek government yesterday decided to slap an extra 12% tax (in addition to the existing 19%) on prepaid cards . This means that a prepaid user will get hit with a 31% tax. Prepaid mobiles are heavily used in this part of the world and mostly by low income groups.
This tax revenue will be used to pay current debt on badly negotiated bonds, band financial management and general economic chaos. In other words the income received will not go towards future wealth, but rather to pay in part for blunders of the past. It’s like selling a piece of property that you could’ve given to your kids, to pay for debts amassed from past pleasures.
Now ARPU (Average Revenue per User) is already on the way down. If I look at my phone charges, for the reasons mentioned above, I can tell you that in the past my bill was about say 120 euro per month; now it barely reaches 18. As stated earlier, this price erosion did not have any major effects on the industry since it was a redistribution of the social surplus. Contracts were renegotiated, profits were made normal, investments continued and employment was stable. The crisis did have a major impact on the communication industry as it did in all industries. When you proceed to slap a two digit tax on a particular service thinking that this service is price insensitive at a time when unemployment is expected to peak at 2010, with the goal of plugging up financial holes then you’re endangering a reverse spiral; more unemployed which will bring less consumption which will bring more unemployed. And since you’re not taking any steps for future wealth, you’re talking about long term havoc.
In an number of presentations and executive seminars regarding network evolution, references are made to ambient networks. This site has received a number of questions about what an ambient network is. We refer you to this excellent paperby Dr. Andreas Schieder, a former collegue at Ericsson (and with whom I had the pleasure of cohosting a number of presentations), which can help answer some of the questions regarding this very exciting research area.
- Antonis Hontzeas
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It’s easy to to adopt the policy of avoiding risk at all costs, that whenever possible, the products you launch or the engagements you have should be flawless and without downside.
Here’s the problem: in most endeavors, a small increase in risk can double the reward. It’s the second doubling of reward that brings serious risk with it. But the first leap is relatively painless.
In the chart above, notice that going from point A to point B brings almost no incremental risk. It might feel scary, but rationally, it’s not. Doubling reward again from B to C, though, brings significant incremental risk. It’s this second doubling that gets you through the Dip, that leads to a breakthrough, that makes you remarkable.
But I’m not even talking about that. I’m just hoping you’ll warm up by making the tiny leap of avoiding all risk. Riskless is hardly worth your effort.
The current financial crunch has taken a heavy toll on today’s business environment and has forced corporations to seek nontraditional ways of minimizing costs while concurrently maximizing productivity and general efficiency. One of the heaviest contributors to total fixed costs is of course office space.
Most people commute or drive to work eventually making their way to some sort of permanent working space whether it’s an office or a desk. For an office worker, typical deskwork includes processing documents, emails and phone communication, while daily interactions with co-workers take place through scheduled or ad hoc meetings in fixed meeting rooms or other building areas. Dealings with customers and suppliers is done through fixed building assets including communication and computing devices as well as meeting areas (your or the customer’s office; your or the customer’s conference rooms). Managing the warehouse (if you’re unlucky to have one) is of course another burden that translates to a fixed cost (add to that the inventory costs; if your forecasts were misaligned with market realities then you have quite a situation). Your general building costs which are always reflected in your Year to Yield and annual income statements are in the short term independent of your business reality and are thus always present whether you’re in business, or quietly going out of business.
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Mobile communication networks are moving to a common ip based transport technology that will eventually offer ubiquitous coverage, smooth interaction between different standards (connected anytime, anyplace) converged communication services (the same service adapted to your location and whether you are on the go or sitting somewhere) supported by a common network . This means for the operator reduced operation (opex) expenses (common infrastructure, common serviced and reduced operation and maintenance costs), implying a better price tag on offered services.
Fixed office functionality is slowly expanding to the mobile environment through a host of new applications (ex. wireless whiteboards), stronger communication devices (ex. Nokia E series smart phones, Blackberries, iphones and android platforms etc…), adapted products and solutions (ex. Microsoft office (mobile),Sybase ianywhere, Unified Communications mobile solution, Automobile office technologies etc…) and increased access bandwidths (for ex. HSPA+,Long Term Evolution, Mobile WiMax etc…).
Ubiquitous radio access converged with the fixed phone system means that you can start your work day at home or at your preferred location and move as required without disrupting the workflow. You can process all your documents remotely (emails, proposals, tenders, offers) through your company’s vpn , make and receive calls while stationed or on the go, book teleconferences at home or in your car (while taking all necessary traffic precautions) and agree to meet with customers in cafes, posh restaurants or classy hotel lounges. Of course airline bookings and hotel reservations are already a gas with web bookings and e-tickets and can easily be managed from a mobile office.
Support of backoffice applications such as CRM and ERP is taken for granted and just in time deliveries and mobile tracking systems can vastly improve your inventory management and reduce, if not eliminate warehouse requirements.
World Economic realities imply that financial efficiencies and corporate streamlining will continue to be a predominant force in the next couple of years. Luckily enough communication technology is progressing at such a rate, that if present mobility trends continue, the mobile office will become indispensible factor of day to day business, resulting in improved productivity and rendering fixed office costs a thing of the past. Finally a fully mobile working environment will enhance economic efficiency through reduced frictional unemployment, since relocation will no longer be an employment condition.
Starting Jan 2010 the EU will invest about 18M euro for R+D into 4th generation mobile broadband communication networks.
Mme Reding stipulated that LTE will continue the European tradition of dominance in the mobile communication field that was started about 25 years ago with GSM.
Note that the cellular concept (which is what GSM and LTE are based upon) started from a couple of patents from Motorola and AT&T. Then Motorola and AT&T engaged each other in a court based civil war that lasted about 10 years, relinquishing a good portion of the market to European companies like LM Ericsson. The major breathrough in America came when the European TDMA proposal (spearheaded by Ericsson) became the default standard for digital cellular (as opposed to ATT backed FDMA), a standard that also formed the foundation of GSM access (the equivalent American standard is referred to as AMPS/DAMPS). GSM, aside from being state of the art, became an industrialized and fully standardized network easily allowing economies of scale, quick deployment and easy adaptation to market needs, and of course a roadmap allowing the market to see its evolution. From then on Europe
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took command of mobile communication development. GSM slowly made its way to America with Cingular deploying a coast to cost network.
From 2004 to 2007 the EU funded (with about 25 M euro) research into the improvement and standardization of LTE through the WINNER I and II programs which involved numerous telecom companies and research centers.
Initial LTE networks are currently (or scheduled to be) running in Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain Sweden and the UK. Verizon has also scheduled LTE deployment in its network.
Of course one major issue in all this is the still continuing problem of site acquisition. The initial concept was developed with the 80/20 business model where 80 percent of the business came from 20 percent of the customers. In other words few base stations and substantial revenue. Today we have many base stations and deteriorating revenue (and hopefully no future health issues). Clearly the cellular concept is reaching its limits;people are beginning to complain about all these base stations, while higher propagation frequencies require more base stations. On the other hand you have my neighbour “free riding” his access to the internet (ie. he’s using a “leaky” WiFi channel paid by some other household to gain free access to the WWW). So this kind of gives you thoughts about changing the whole mobile communication concept into some sort of ad hoc network where in population dense areas the mobile terminals use each other to help communicate with a central receiver/transmitter, and you only use direct base station to terminal communication in sparse areas where there are no, or too few active communication terminals. This means a substantial reduction of base stations in areas where base stations are a real problem (ie. cities).Some food for thought.
“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
Henry Ford
In order to be successful with anything , you have to know who you are (Socrates : Know thyself) and you have to know what you want (Vision). The intermediate process is called a strategy which consists of a gap analysis (what we need to get from where we are to where we are going) and different tactics and scenarios on how to get there.
This applies for individuals, companies and countries and history and experience has shown that all are interrelated.
A country has to have an understanding of its capabilities, and has to have a vision of what it wants to be and by when. A country that has no such vision is characterized by short term measures both in its internal and foreign policy, and leaves an overall impression of unreliability. Such a country is usually characterized by short term measures and usually succumbs to foreign interests in the long term.
Companies that are and want to remain successful also need to have a
Oh my God, there's two of them !
strong understanding of their core skills, and a vision of where they are headed. A company’s performance in the local and world market depends strongly on where the company is located. A country’s bad reputation in one or another area may tarnish a company’s image in that area. If a particular company excels in telecommunication products, but the country it resides within is not considered competitive in that area, then it is in the best interests of the company to move to a country that includes telecommunications in its competitive advantage portfolio.
Unemployed and lovin' It !
In 2000 Deutsche Telekom made a bid for Telecom Italia. The merger attempt eventually failed with one of the reasons being that, according to some, there would’ve been a difficulty in merging a Southern European with a Northern European corporate culture. DT ’s later acquisition proved that this wasn’t so, and that perhaps there were other non corporate reasons. Then Pirelli bought Telecom Italia and when it attempted to sell it to non Italian interests, the government of Romano Pronti moved in and stopped the attempt. Some may question Pronti’s actions as interfering with market operations. Some may state that the market should regulate itself. The market can indeed regulate itself. It did in the 30s and resulted in a new equilibrium that was fine for some people, but that also resulted in large unemployment. If employment is not a key ingredient in a particular nation’s/government’s quality parameters, then such self correction activity should indeed be allowed (of course that didn’t turn out too well for the Romanovs, Rasputin or no Rasputin, but human memory is indeed short). If employment is an important factor, then government intervention to regulate the self regulating market economy is a must. Maybe that’s what the Italians, who (as their Roman predecessors) are masters of strategy, had in mind when they salvaged Telecom Italia. At that time their telecom industry was considered an important ingredient/parameter in Italia’s strategic evolution, and they acted accordingly.
Lack of vision and strategy means lack of faith in the long term and encourages a culture of quick profits eventually leading a nation, a company, and an individual towards oblivion.
A country must first understand and accept its identity, then attain a vision of what it wants to become and by when, and then agree on a survival strategy. Once this is done then everything else starts to fall into place including proper education, vital industries, and appropriate economic models.
Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world…BURN.
Ok first I’ll select a working platform, say eBay.
Then I’ll buy whole lotta stuff, say airline tickets.
I’ll position these items at various accounts in eBay, or at eBay affiliate sites (otherwise known as site Brokers).
Now I have to sell the stuff and I’m gonna need some finesse, some smarts, some luck and some tools.
Now I have to see what the competition is doing, and maybe copy their success onto my sites. One such way is to check out what “hot” words they are using and emulate them.
Obtaining hot keywords is good because you can incorporate the keywords into your item page and because you get a window into what merchandise sells and what sells NOT. In other words you’re using competitive intelligence to see what SEO ingredients your competitors are using thus allowing you to chart your course.
You can thus incorporate your competitors’ success into your business strategy. This includes profiting from pay per click (PPC) since most PPCs depend on SEO which itself depends on metadata which depend on the right tags or keywords.
So yes, this can be considered a form of online competitive intelligence.
What about ethics?
Well it depends on how you do it; if you do corporate espionage then perhaps there is an ethics problem; If you’re doing it the slick way then you gain a competitive business advantage (required for any business). As Admiral Ellis Zacharias once noted, you can get most competitive intelligence info from every day commonly available sources.
You just have to know where to look and how to interpret it.
Rupert Murdoch has been vocal lately about locking up (by 2010) his online news sites.
“Good press comes at a price” sez the news mogul.
He’s also lobbying other news publishers with the goal of leaving online users little option but to pay for online news.
Of course these innovative thoughts could backfire.
First of all when you give something for free, its difficult to later put a price tag on it. Secondly even if he and his friends do close up the sights, some other newbie will come around and give the same offering for free. I mean when local newspaper prices started going up, here came Big George Kyrtsos and offered his City Press and Free Sunday editions for free (ad based revenue model). They became one of the hottest selling items in the local news domain. Then suddenly prices started coming down again but too late, he had established his market share.
Remember that journalists are in reality brokers, like real estate agents. The act as intermediaries between a source/supply (raw news) and demand. Of course some reporters add value by taking this raw supply and adding insight. This insight may be purposely directed through some upper force, or may be downtoearth honest insight by the reporter (rare, very rare..) to help her audience digest the raw information. For example one of the greatest reporters of all time, Michael MacClear (an honor to journalism) added valuable insight at a time when things where never black or white, but shades of grey (we don’t seem to have many such reporters today…).
So going back to our original tune, if Big Rupert closes up his sites, you can expect competition to offer free information; in other words such actions would be a general strategic blunder on behalf of Ruppy and the results are sure to make their way into future MBA case studies.
Murdoch owns more than 100 newspapers (including the Wall Street Journal) and various TV stations around the world. Murdoch’s news empire is currently in the red at about 3,4 billion USD.
If Murdoch’s strategy works (if he goes ahead and implements it; it seems that he’s presently on the hunt for feedback and ideas so go ahead and comment) then some of that red may turn to black. If not then the mistake may cost him a good portion of tomorrow’s online market.
new through journalists is in reality a brokerage business,sort of like real estate brokerage. They sell information that you can’t go and get yourself ie. they are the intermediaries between the supply and the demand.
Spent a week in Lefkada. Great food (fish mostly) cheap prices good service.
Then I took of and spent 1 1/2 weeks in Pilion. Whilst on my way to the hotel I ran into a Centaur; the “gentlehorseman” invited me to join him in watching the Panathinaikos – Atletico soccer game, but I politely
girls playing backgammon (tavli)
declined stating that I already knew what the result would be; Atletico would kick Panathinaikos’ ass since Atletico played collectively like a team (even though it has a strong star lineup) while Panatinaikos has great players who leave much to be desired insofar as a team spirit goes. The Centaur took a fit and we proceeded to wrestle; I managed to jui jitsu (Belgarion : Shomenei…) his arm and before his hind legs could get me, I ran to the car and sped off. Needless to say I took another road on the way to return to Volos.
Pilio was excellent;I stayed at a very good place with excellent service (if you wanna know which place send a mail to edinpress as per above) and the service was generally very good with good prices. Parking was a definite problem though!
From Volos I spotted a couple of rides and ended up for a couple of days in KEA where Iwas gonna give some execs a rev up on LTE and what I see as coming after LTE (you’re gonna have to wait for that one Hecklesson Porgies since this is still considered confidential and not quite yet in the hands of industry;hint;ad hoc nw). Anyway the luncheon was cancelled and I ended up drinking late at night with an Italian, a Brit, a Frenchman and some dude from Aruba. They weren’t interested in LTE but they asked me if I could pull some strings so they can get a licence to dive and check some things out with the Britannic.
It will be remembered that HRMS Britannic (the sister ship of HRMS Titanic) acted in WW I as a hospital ship supporting Churchill’s disasterous campaign in the Dardanelles. Even though the government of Elefterios Venizelos who knew the area well (since he after all pushed the Ottoman’s back to Asia) warned Churhill not to engage in the campaign, Churchill went ahead anyway (sort of like the Norwegian Iron Coast)thus decimated his imperial forces.
Anyway,they wanted to see if the ship had been torpedoed or whatever.
I told them torpedo my kazoo !
The Britannic like the Titanic I stipulated sank because of man’s (ladies pardon the masculine;I fully include you in this) arrogance in the same way that Capaneus’ arrogance forced Almighty Zeus to thunderbolt him into a cloud of smoke (Capaneus climbs the Theban gates and screams that not even Zeus can stop him from taking the city;well Zeus stopped him. The Titanic it will be remember was labelled as “unsinkable”. Well, it sank and it sank hard !).
Anyway I left before the divers managed to get the licence but I am anxiously awaiting news from them and some fotos of the said ship which I will indeed, after permissions, post.
Here’s three things you need to do to live a happy and healthy life (as per the wise Centaur and the drunk divers) :
1. Eat properly (a mediterranean diet is a good start)
2. Work out (this includes both physical and mental ie. education, reading etc…)
3. Take everything with a grain of salt (don’t get to sad, don’t get to happy, moderation in everything) and think things out (with your head, not your heart).
Who knows, after a couple of healthy years you’ll end up looking like him:
Arsonist have struck again, following the same strategy as they did in 2007 setting multiple fires in geographically remote regions, thus aiming to disperse the country’s firefighting force and render its effort fruitless.
Fires are currently raging all over the country and notably in Corinth and Attica.
In Attica, fires are predominantly located in the North East region mainly in the areas of Dionysos, Stamata, Marathon and Barnabas. The township of Dionysos has been evacuated and order has been given for the children’s hospital of Penteli to immediatly begin evacuation since the Dionisos fires are making their way towards Pendeli; the Marathon fires are making their way towards Nea Makri, threatening the townships of Pikermi and Gerakas.
This arson attack is considered the worst in the country’s history and the fires are currently (aided by the strong winds (Meltemia) that usually visit Greece in August) out of control.
We’ll keep you posted.
23 aug.2009
fires have decimated Sasi, Grammatikos and are currently spreading to Pallini; fires are also threatening the residential area of Agios Stefanos.Cinders from the “burnt offerings” are making their way to the posh Northern Athenian townships of Brilissia, Melissia and Agia Paraskevi and Mount Pendeli is no longer visible from those areas (due to the heavy smoke).
The event : This intoxicated British dude comes on to a Cretan girl. She dodges politely his advances but he persists to the point where he tries to slip his hand down her pants. The lady takes a fit, empties the bottle of Sambuca she had on the table over the British guy, and summarily sets him on fire with her lighter. Needless to say the bloke ends up in the hospital and the fiery lady in the hands of police.
This, according to both Greek and British witnesses was a clear case of sexual harassment.
Judging from the Mayan legend, Kukulkan was either some Atlantinian that had to leave his people (the Mayas) to prepare for the ensuing war with Athens, or some lost Greek Captain/Philosopher returning from the war with Troy. I mean KuKulcan had the ability to change from human to serpent and back again. Do you suppose that Cadmus (the founder of Thebes and husband to Harmonia in whose wedding all the gods were invited as guests) mayhap paid the Mayans a visit (recall that the founder of Athens, Erechtheus was also part serpent) and then quickly returned to Thebes to help Atlantis wage war against Thebes’ eternally sworn enemy, Athens? Well if he did both Atlantis and Thebes lost miserably even though almighty Zeus was tipping the scale in their favor (women have a way of winning wars so Athena and Hera played their part well). Cadmus nevertheless ruled Thebes for a very long time and he and his wife Harmonia were rewarded by the gods with eternal life and were transformed to sacred worshipful entities (the Pelasgic influence to the newly arrived Greeks that tended, like all IndoEuropeans to worship celestial divinities).
Of course all the Maya/Ulmec alludations to the sea, in their legends and pyramid inscriptions could be symbolic, and the sea may actually be outer space. If that is the case the Kukulkan may have been a spaceman with very human features (the maya legends describes him as blond and blue eyed and with an eliptoid kinda head;Mayan mothers use to implement some sort of cast on their newborn’s head in order to get it to form an elipse, something that the Spanish frowned upon). Or maybe it was just the devil paying the Mayas a visit after having blown away Adam and Eve. Anyway, these features gave the Spanish a strategic advantage since the Mayas and Aztecs initially thought the the Catalans represented the return of their blonde god. BIG MISTAKE !
Regardless, I’m gonna have to go back to Yucatan one of this days and finish the work I started.
For now, off on a cruise to the lovely Ionian Islands to ponder of these and other such things.
One the one side Ericsson made and won? a killer bid for Nortel (good move ol’ LM – Let’s see what NSN comes up with); and while the dogfight’s on we’ll see how the Chinese respond (you know in the Balkan Wars while Greece and Bulgaria were fighting it out, Romania marched into Sofia without a gunshot fired…you catch my drift?).
On the other side of the user plain :
SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc have agreed to an online search and advertising partnership, in an attempt to rival Google Inc, that will be announced within 24 hours, a source familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.
Microsoft will not pay an upfront fee to Yahoo, and the focus of the deal is on sharing revenue between the two companies, said the source, who did not want to be identified because a formal announcement has not been made.
The news and details of the expected deal were first reported by the AllThingsDigital blog and Advertising Age.
Microsoft and Yahoo declined comment. The two companies have talked for months about cooperating in the online advertising market, dominated by Google.
Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo last year but its $47.5 billion bid was rebuffed and Yahoo’s attempt to seal a search advertising deal with Google Inc fell apart under regulatory scrutiny.
Under the expected deal, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will power Yahoo’s searches, according to Advertising Age, while Yahoo will handle the advertising sales, using Microsoft technology.
The deal should give Bing a giant boost in competing with Google’s search engine. Google’s search engine dominates the marketplace with 65 percent of U.S. Internet searches, according to figures provided by research firm ComScore. Last month, Microsoft had only 8.4 percent of the market and Yahoo 19.6 percent.
There is a chance a deal combining the powers of the second and third-ranked search engine companies would be blocked by antitrust regulators. Google and Yahoo dropped plans for an advertising partnership last year under opposition from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Shareholders of both Microsoft and Yahoo have been urging the two to strike a deal for some time. Earlier this month, activist investor Carl Icahn, who owns about 5 percent of Yahoo and is a director on its board, spoke out in favor of a search deal, as talks between the two companies appeared to regain momentum.
Shares of Yahoo traded at $17.39 in after-hours trading after closing at $17.22, while shares of Microsoft rose to $23.51 in after-hours trading from their close of $23.47.
(Reporting by Bill Rigby and Alexei Oreskovic, writing by Tiffany Wu; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Carol Bishopric)
Here’s a lesson for you nuncle (taught at a popular MBA class in some part of the world):
A Russian billionaire visits a remote Greek island that has just past a couple of months of bad weather. Needless to say tourism in the island has been at an all time low and there’s simply no cash to go around; everyone on the island is in debt.
The Russian dude visits the classiest hotel, puts 100 euro on the counter and asks the hotel owner to show him around the island. The hotel owner takes the 100 euro and orders the bellboy to take the Russian on a tour.
The hotel owner quickly rushes to the local butcher and gives him the 100 euro thus paying off past accumulated debt due to meat purchases. The butcher then runs to the meat wholesaler and gives him the 100 euro thus paying off all past accumulate debt. The wholesaler rushes off to the meat producer, the only bachelor in the island, and gives him the 100 euro thus eliminating his debt to the producer.
The producer runs to the local brothel and submits his 100 euro to the Madame of the good house thus eliminating debt for services past rendered.
The Madame take her cabriole Volks and drives off to the classy hotel that started this chain reaction (or multiplication effect), and submits the 100 euro she owed the hotel for the rooms she used in the past to offer her services.
The Russian and bellboy return and the Russian states that the island won’t do and demands his 100 Euros back. The hotel owner gladly obliges and returns to the Russian his 100 euro and everyone is happy.
Notice how a single 100 resolved all debt and eventually made its way back to the original issuer. This is the importance of liquidity and this is why governments and banks are rushing to “oil” the system with cash.
Any robust management system has built in grievance handling provisions. These grievance handling mechanisms are usually independent of the management body and have the chief role of safeguarding the corporation from systemized detrimental principle agent problems (old boys’ networks and golden boy cliques). In other words, the grievance handling mechanism introduces an independent communication channel that allows employees and managers to anonymously voice their opinion and concerns. In the past such channels helped bring to light various issues including dubious business practices. If used properly unofficial communication channels protect a company and its shareholders in the same way as official ones, if not more.
The same principles apply to government and society. The ability to anonymously communicate via some form of media or communication channel (which implies the use of a communication device be it a fixed or mobile terminal) implies an unofficial grievance communication channel.
Many individuals will abuse such channels and use them for the purposes of reputation damage and blackmail. The individuals who make a career out of such practices have used in the past other channels (usually official) and have experienced positive reinforcement.
In ancient Athens, the night before the Sicilian expedition, sycophantic activity resulted in the castration of religious statues. One explanation for this was that a group of citizens who were against the expedition had no other channel to voice their complaints and reverted to such activity. Another explanation was that the activity was perpetrated by Alcibiades’ enemies in order to discredit him. Since there was never any root cause analysis performed by the Athenians on these actions, any conclusions are pure speculation. What we do know is that the civil war started a chain reaction that eventually led to the collapse of a great civilization. What we also know is that during the Assembly sessions everyone agreed with General Alcibiades (Groupthink[1]) so disagreement was basically a “behind the scenes” affair[2].
Perhaps sycophantic activity as well as other anonymous complaints should be made the subject of study, and some sort of correlation should be sought between the activity and how much the official grievance channels (i.e. the system) actually work; how much faith the population has in the system. In addition the content of this activity (as well as any other information and complaints arising from anonymous channels) should also be studied with the goal of identifying improper procedures and corrupt business or political practices. Usually such practices can only be uncovered through unofficial channels since the official channels are controlled by the individuals that may be implicated in these practices.
As Winston Churchill noted, all information is important especially raw information stemming from uncontrolled unfiltered channels (ex: unregistered mobile terminals and other access devices anonymously posting to social media and other forums) and any robust management (or social) system should have access to such channels. Information from unofficial channels should be studied instead of cancelled. Such channels allow management (and government) a view into a whole different information universe, and provide a hazard shield against parasitic activity such as Groupthink.
Protecting society from mal intent is everyone’s responsibility.
Pretending that an issue does not exist by muffing the medium is the same thing as an Ostrich sticking its head in the ground when confronted by danger. Individuals choose anonymous channels to voice their opinions chiefly because they do not have faith in the official communication channels. If these unofficial channels are removed, some individuals may choose other not necessarily peaceful routes to express their discontent.
[1] When everyone in a committee agrees with the strong man, or the charismatic one. Renders decision committees and management teams useless.
[2] The theatre also presented another unofficial channel of dissent. Euripides’ Trojan Women criticized heavily Athens’ conduct towards her allies. The fact that the play was allowed right before the Sicilian Expedition reflects the soundness of Athenian democracy at the time.
Unstructured data; Those two words alone cause turmoil to business practices and render decision makers nervous especially when the monumental amount of customer related information (from all channels, including the Web) comes into play. In fact, the story goes that over 80% of the world’s data is unstructured, and businesses are indeed suffering.
From low online conversions and high abandonment rates, declining loyalty and an inability to react to feedback and customer sentiment quickly enough, it’s all a big, virtual mess. There are certainly tools on the rise that attempt to remedy the issue, but many fail in truly connecting with and acting on information across the enterprise. The ones that succeed have in common various ingredients as we will see below.
The Approach
The approach that will ultimately achieve the goal of properly extracting meaning from all forms of mined text, rich media, video and audio is many times referred to as “meaning based marketing”. The resultant extracted and rationalized information will then be plugged into over 500 functions that help marketers improve the experience for their customers.
The approach must necessarily have its roots in any mashup of data which will require an ability to understand the meaning behind the many forms of information with focus on optimizing online business performance. This interpretation of information will form the foundation of deriving meaning from the same information, meaning that will be used as input in any strategic marketing endeavor.
In addition, successful interpretation of the derived data will provide an order of magnitude increase in the amount and types of information that can be leveraged, as well as the ability to interpret the meaning and act on that information. These next-generation solutions will transform how organizations manage customer interaction and multi-channel marketing, enabling both the business and the customer to reach a far greater desired outcome.
The Requirements:
Any approach towards proper interpretation of mined data will consist of the following requirements:
Detect and Act on Customer Sentiment: Businesses should be able to identify key trends or customer sentiments emerging through blogs, twitter posts, or social networking sites. That information can be used to build a conceptual profile, and immediate action in response to a problem or to capitalize on an opportunity is expected to follow.
Rapidly Segment and Optimize Customer Interactions: The technology used shall automatically create relevant audience segments and build on these meaning-based profiles over time in order to target customers and optimize interactions
Organize Analyze, and Maximize Rich Media: Most customers are today familiar with rich media. Solutions for understanding and cataloguing video, audio, and rich media assets and classifying those assets for targeting and optimization will be available.
Understand and Link the Meaning behind Every Customer Touch point: The required tools will organize, understand, and scale the constantly growing amount of information that exists in structured and unstructured systems today, including social media, chat, print, email, call center, customer databases, mobile, and other forms of information.
Automatically Archive Websites and Dynamic Web Pages: corporate websites and transactions will be automatically archived and audited to comply with regulations
The Aspiration:
THE RAPIDLY EMERGING FIELD OF knowledge discovery has grown significantly in the past few years. This growth is driven by a mix of daunting practical needs and strong research interest. The technology for computing storage has enabled people to collect and store information from a wide range of sources at rates that were, only a few years ago, considered unimaginable. Although modern database technology enables economical storage of these large streams of data, we are now only beginning to develop technologies that will help us analyze, understand, and visualize this stored data, and truly bring order from chaos.
Leadership : Karajan Conducting Beethoven (Allegretto 7th Symphony) or FurtWegler conducting the 5th (he gets up on the podium,crosses his arms, looks at the Berliner Philarmonic, blinks, and…pa pa pa paaaaaaaam, the first movement begins).
Divinity : The Allegretto itself (only God could’ve inspired Beethoven to write such an Allegretto; as a matter of fact creations such as Beethoven, Bach or Phideas could’ve only been conceived by The Divine).
Confidence : Babe Ruth calling the shot in the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, held on 1 October 1932 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
The concept of bounded rationality, introduced by Herbert Simon, sheds light into the various parameters that affect management decision making and human decision making in general, especially when it comes to purchase decisions.
The whole point is that rational thought is limited by several factors, including irrational ones. This is where many decision based models, including utility concepts in economics and win win negotiation scenarios fail. These models use as their underlying foundation that humans are rational entities similar to Mr. Spock. Anyone that has worked in a company, tried to sell or buy real estate or dealt with government officials realizes, within the frame of his/her bounded rationality, that things aren’t that simple and quite often (nay, very often) the said models fail.
Here’s a nice little description of bounded rationality (from :changingminds.org)
Bounded Rationality
We are, to some extent, rational beings in that we will try to logically understand things and make sensible choices.
However, the world is large and complex, and we do not have the capacity to understand everything. We also have a limited time in which to make decisions.
As a result, our decisions are not fully thought through and we can only be rational within limits such as time and cognitive capability. Herbert Simon indicated that there were thus two major causes of bounded rationality:
Limitations of the human mind
The structure within which the mind operates
This impacts decision models that assume us to be fully rational. For example when calculating expected utility, you may be surprised to find that people do not make the best choices.
Example
I choose a new hi-fi system based on reading a few magazines and listening to several friends. When the sales person offers me a better bargain, I still turn it down.
So what?
Using it
Either play within the bounds of rationality by giving the other person few choices and limited criteria, or break their existing bounds by showing how these are ineffective (then help them set up cognitive camp elsewhere).
Defending
When you make a decision, pause to reflect whether what seems rational is adequate. As necessary, test your decision with other people. Do not be hurried into a decision by others.
Since we’ve received a number of questions (about 484) about the LTE ebook, we are pleased to announce that the ebook will be released on this site on July 30th. It will be available for free download.
Pass on the good word and Be there or be square !Click on the book and download it !!!!
Rumours have it that Big Bill Gates is interested in purchasing the Golden Greek’s (Aristotle Onassis) Ionian island of Scorpiosnext to Lefkada.
There are some entanglement issues with inheritance and Olympic Airways entitlements, but just the fact that Gates was in the area a couple of days ago has speculation brewing and property prices skyrocketing.
Well, it seems that dead or alive, Big Telly can still make money.
YouTube’s rumored (again) to be in a financial black hole. It could be true, it could be overblown, it could be false and it could be spread by the competition.
If its true and if the situtation deteriorates, we may eventually be questioning the whole advertising based revenue model that was initially brought about by tv and radio, and adopted by the internet. Or it may just be that there’s too many applications in the inet, and the natural order of things is taking its clean out effect. Fewer applications means more subscribers means a sellers market which eventually means subscription fees.
BTW, now that the pirate bay’s sold, we may be seeing a change in climate in the whole “free internet” thing.
Michael Jackson’s sudden death spread at a geometric viral rate, and (cfr. Akamai’s news net usage index) and caused server outages everywhere.
For example, Google News had to temporarily block all “Michael Jackson” search requests since the systems incorrectly thought they were under a “denial of service” attack .
The problem was patched by Google through a temporary block, but other sites, including Jackson’s official website and London’s O2 concert venue, where Jackson was set to kick off his 50-date come back tour next month, weren’t so lucky.
Also, Michael Jackson’s Wikipedia page had to be locked down after users accessed it over 1 million times in less than an hour.
Twitter’s site activity almost tripled as millions of users tweeted real time information of Jackson’s arrival at the hospital, rumors of a coma and eventually confirmation of his death. As a result of all the extra traffic, Twitter’s Fail Whale error page made multiple unwanted cameos on Thursday and Friday.
Online retailers (similar to store outlets when Elvis died) profited from the madness and sales of his music on iTunes and Amazon.com skyrocketed. Currently 6 of the top 10 selling songs on iTunes are Jackson’s.
On the other side of the ocean, Swedish The Pirate Bay, was sold to Global Gaming Factory (GGF), a Stockholm-based software developer and Internet/gaming cafe franchise for $60 million Swedish Kronor, or $7.8 million dollars. GGF intends to respect copyright by introducing models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid . Last week The Pirate Bay owners lost their appeal in Swedish court for a retrial and were hit with a $3.9 million dollar fine and sentenced to a year in jail.
There are certain people that put integrity above all other wordly matters. These people cannot be understood by the common penny pincher, or those that place a priority on materialistic fortune.
There is a certain chap who was at one time positioned, through career and synchronicity, to make a vast fortune. All he had to do was sign a couple of documents, make a couple of decisions, and proceed with certain actions.
This chap placed a higher value on his integrity, and intentionally missed his big chance at becoming a very, very rich man.
Certain current cultures would undoubtedly assign to this individual the epiteth of a malaka, a shmuck.
Well, to this individual his integrity was worth much more, than all the cash in the world. You either understand it or you don’t.
And if you don’t, you never will…
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within – Will Durant
Based on a seminar that was given in Brussels by yours truly.
The video above was used as an example of teamwork .
Notice how coordinated the band is, the precision of the start and stop sequences and how well the guitar and organ solos line up (Ritchie Blackmore – John Lord), smoothly supported by the rhythm layer (Ian Payce – Roger Glover) and how amazingly in tune Ian Gillan is; just joking Ian.
If your co’s management team works like this, then you’re 70 % on your way towards meeting exogenous (endo and exo corporate) threats especially when budget cuts start taking effect and corporate resources start becoming scarce.
If your management team has a history of internal bickering, rivalry and personal agendas, then you can rest assured some other management team is preparing to take over your turf whether its your market share or your market unit.
"Child in Time" is dedicated to the memory of Christina, June 2009, Stoupa Mani
As we’ve outlined in past entries, peer to peer and distributed agent technologies have many applications, and will have many more.
There’s a very very interesting paper written by D. Sanchez Guzman, Cesar Mora and R. Garcia-Salcedo (Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Mexico DF) outlining the use of distributed agent technologies in the teaching of Science in general, and Physics in particular. This study is published in the Latin American Journal of Physics Education, Vol. 3, No. 2, May 2009.
We consider it an honor that the above research paper includes as one of its references (reference 2) a past entryof “evolution in communication“.
I do a lot of travelling. I’m away on business 70% of the time within a working week. Because of my frequent travels I need to travel light and to be able to work on the go. You can understand why I have a Netbook. Every now and then I need to get stuff for my Netbook but because of my frequent travels, going store hopping is out of the question. So this is where the internet comes in.
Then I ran into this site and the products they offer, specifically the Laptop Accessories. Since I’m into VAIO my particular interest orbited around Sony VAIO P Accessories and Sony VAIO P Cases. Again, since I’m usually on the go I need to quickly scan through the products, find what I’m looking for, compare prices and also check out if there’s any negative feedback (this is where the blog comes in) as well as the ability to communicate with the company for compatibility questions, and product specifications.
The site also caught my attention because its simply built with ample photographs and ease of navigation and the way the products stand out. I was able to easily browse through a wide range of Netbook accessories (and device specific accessories that are compatible with my Netbook; Laptops are also supported) and pinpoint in a matter of minutes the exact case for my Netbook.
Of course the actual product characteristics provide valuable help in actually promoting the products through a website, and the detailed photography and simplicity of design greatly facilitate the trial aspect of any purchase process. This is imperative in any products promoted over the web since in each purchase decision, the consumer goes through a process where he/she visualizes using the product and if the particular promotion channel somehow impedes this, then this is one more point towards a negative purchasing decision.
To the first son he left 1/2 his camels, to the second 1/3 and to the youngest 1/9.
The sons being confused and all, had no idea on how to divide the camels without slaughtering them. So they went to this old lady seeking advice.
The ol’ gal gave them as a gift one of her camels (making the total amount 18 camels) and told them to go ahead and divide the camels up as per their father’s last will and testament.
So the first son had 9 camels, the second 6 and the last 2. Now the sum after this division is 17 which means that one camel remains, the camel that the old lady gave them as a gift, and which the three sons were more than happy to return as a token of thanks.
So with a bit of imagination and a different viewing angle, any impossibility can be turned to a win win situation.
In the late eighties, global economies were bracing for one more (of the now all too familiar) crisis. The economies of most western countries were overheating (high inflation) and interest rates were on their way up. The market was up to its ears in debt (thanks to Reganomics leaving the American economy 1 trillion in the hole by the end of the 80s) and was also in the midst of another speculative fever.
In the late 80s, legendary CEO Lars Ramqvist decided to take a risk (a calculated risk, not a speculative risk) and focus his company (while spinning off unwanted none core units) into cellular telephony. Ramqvist had been president of the mobile division for a number of years, and knew the market, the technology and his company’s ability well. While other companies were trimming their investments and workforce, Ramqvist started investing in R+D and took all the required steps (as per his strategic plan and gap analysis) to prepare Ericsson for its claim to the title of mobile telecommunications world leader. One of the results of the investment in R+D was the creation of radio TDMA which allowed cellular systems to expand into a digital modulation scheme, without affecting the existing cell plan (ie. the radio network did not have to be redesigned). For this, Ramqvist and Ericsson were awarded the IEEE technology award of the year as well as a good portion of the digital mobile market (which included both TDMA and GSM markets). Ramqvist was also eventually made a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
But Ramqvists’ success was not the resultant technology, but his strategy. His strategy transformed Ericsson into a global telecommunications player, a company that enjoyed continuous growth for more than 10 years with adequate return to its shareholders, and a shooting star in the telecom world.
His strategy consisted of focusing on a market (mobile telecom), taking a calculated risk (he knew the business and the required inputs and the expected outputs due to his past tenures) including the necessary investments, and leadership (convincing his management team and the company to go for it!).
Jack grew up in Montreal within the framework of the Canadian vertical mosaic. Jack, an orphan and thus a widow’s son, graduated from McGill University with an honors degree in Electrical Engineering (he earned his degree through hard work and paid for his semester by playing piano at a posh downtown bar). His Profs wanted him to go on to graduated studies, but Jack had other plans.
Jack wanted to see the world .
Jack joined a multinational and he did well. He did so well that he became one of the most respected professionals in his domain (Jack managed to take a short break from his career and complete, at company expense, an Msc. in Administration from SLOAN; Jack wanted to see how it would be to study and live in Boston). Subsidiaries of the company were so eager to have him guide them, that they insisted on putting him at the most expensive local hotels whenever he found the time to pay them a visit. For example every time he travelled to Dublin (one of Jack’s favorite destinations), the local company always put him up in one of the executive suites of The Shelburne hotel next to St. Stephen’s Green (JFK’s favorite hotel and notable for its bar which hosts the Dublin, Dun Laoghaire and Dalkey elite Thursday nights). Now anyone with deep pockets and their own business can rent a room in a luxury hotel, but there’s always something more to be said when someone else is willing to pay for such comforts (which also included a limo for his home away from home urban travel needs).
A number of Jack’s friends, while Jack was continent hopping, established their own business and made money. But Jack wasn’t interested in money. Jack wanted to see the world. On Tuesday afternoon Jack was walking through the alleys of residencial Polanco and on Wednesday afternoon Jack was entertaining a fine Athenian lady under the Acropolis. Jack respected the importance of money, but also understood that he would live only once, and the more he could absorb from this world, the better. So Jack did not underestimate the power of money, but he didn’t overestimate it either. There was a time and a place for everything.
Of course the years passed and Jack eventually left his multinational, Business wasn’t what it use to be and since it got quite boring, Jack decided to call it quits; of course with a little help. People shy away at leaving their work in their forties, especially in the midst of a crisis, but Jack see’s it as the natural thing to do. His line of business went down, he’s seen the world and savored its flavors, so now its time to do something that will be in tune with the times to come. Jack’s right now on the Trans Siberian hoping to catch a good view of Kazan. He’s coming back in a couple of weeks and he’s gonna be doing something totally new. He won’t blend into any traditional modes or predefined paths; he’ll use his imagination and create something that fits his way of life, his style, his essence, his raison d’etre.
Don’t get me wrong, Jack isn’t working out of the system.
Jack IS the system.
Your Long Term Evolution e-book will be out in two weeks time. And yes its free !
People from all over the world are rushing to secure a place in the opening of the new Acropolis Museum this Saturday night . Ticket reservations stretch all the way to the end of October with cross global interest including from far away places such as Argentina, and the land of the rising sun. The initial demand from the local population was so high, that the servers supporting the web based system collapsed for a couple of hours until the load sharing function was able to strike a symmetric balance with the related transactions. When the system was restored, tickets for the opening night were sold out within a 15 minute time window. The press has been generally positive except for one or two featured articles in the Guardian which fostered a sarcastic tone (probably having to do with the return of the Elgin marbles; well, sticks and stones ….). Of course a number of journalists predicted that the Athens Olympics in 2004 would be a disaster but the world knows better now, doesn’t it?
So for those that will be attending the Saturday night event (the author of this article is one of them; sorry no pics due to the organizing committee’s request) Greece will be welcoming you to an unequaled opening celebration of our humble building which stands at the foot of one of the greatest achievements of human history.
The Glory of Man
Mrs.Athina Darra inaugurated the “Constantinople 2010″ gala by performing a set of fine Hellenic melodies in the church of Saint Irene in Constantinople (or Istanbul).
So while the Turkish Generals are trying to figure out what to do with Prime Minister Erdogan, this highly publicized event that hosted many Turkish citizens and many foreigners, proved once again that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and that culture and the human spirit prevail over any arm, armour or army :
Brave men were living before Agamemnon
And since, exceeding valorous and sage,
A good deal like him too, though quite the same none;
I remember visiting Prague a couple of years ago, and attending the “black light” theatre. The show of the night was Don Giovanni, and the actors were glow in the dark puppets. Aside from the exceptional music and surrealistic performance, what left an imprint in my mind was the parts of the puppets that glowed in the dark. I have this thing about colourful images and motion against a black background.
Then I ran into this site and the products they offer, specifically the glow bracelets. I imagined how it would be to host a party (at home, in some place or other, or a beach party at night) where we would wear the glow bracelets and stage some kind of show, or just dance. Perhaps we could all dress in black, or gothic like where the only light would be that emitted from the glow bracelets.
The site also caught my attention from the evident motion (the people dancing) vs that dark background, the ease of navigation and the way the products stand out. There are some areas that are a wee bit congested but on the whole that site is navigable and well structured. The areas that are of interested (for example the online help access) are readily found.
Of course the actual product characteristics provide valuable help in actually promoting the products through a website, since the light factor against a dark background enhances the photo, and the simplicity of design greatly facilitates the trial aspect of any purchase process. In other words you don’t have to actually try the product to visualize how you would use it. This is imperative in any products promoted over the web since in each purchase decision, the consumer goes through a process where he/she visualizes using the product and if the particular promotion channel somehow impedes this, then this is one more point towards a negative purchasing decision.
A lot of companies are placing executive control into the hands of bean counters in order to rationalize the costs of the companies, and make some sense out of the continuing financial chaos.
These are the companies that will probably miss out on the next big thing, and eventually sizzle out.
You probably know which cos I’m talking about, and if you don’t you eventually will.
Then you have those companies that, financial crisis aside, will aggressively and dynamically pursue their vision and ideas, and will probably lead us into the next generation of lucrative business practices.
Those are the companies to invest in if you wanna get a good return on your hard earned cash.
What companies are we talking about ?
Well, life would be boring without challenges, wouldn’t it?
”Shoot, why don’t we close all of our factories ? That way we can permanently minimize costs” (A Ford executive to then Ford CFO Lumsden)
As I was sitting drinking my coffee and minding my own business, a kid from DEREE college asked me: “Hey Pop, what’s the wildest thing you ever did”.
I looked at him with ½ closed eyes and said:
“back in ’76, I convinced my red haired green eyed high school sweetheart Wendy to grab a greyhound ride with me from Montreal to Ohio to catch one of the very last Zeppy concerts.”
We didn’t inform our parents and when we got back we both got a good spanking and a 3 month long grounding sentence (aside from the fine from the police since our parents thought we were kidnapped and mobilized the municipality force).
But you know something son, it was worth it. It was worth it because we paid for the trip and tickets with our year long pocket savings, and because the last thing we cared about those days was how you dressed, how much your pa was making, and what kind of car you drove (the best car in high school was driven by a kid working in the local butcher shop; we’re talking now about a Z28; that’s a 4,2L Camarro (he was Italian, the Greeks preferred the equivalent Pontiac Trans Am) for you Mediterranean home grown boys that like to zoom with 1,8L Subarus…).
And yes we all went to college and yes we all struck good careers. Not because our parents helped us but because we put our butts down, studied our kazoos off and hit life with passion. When we needed something we worked for it and when we got slapped down, we stood right up again and fought back with a vengeance (figuratively).
And just to show you that it takes many colors to make a rainbow, about 20 years later in ‘96 I asked my french teacher Pascale (I was her worst student) what she would do if she won 100,000 USD?
She said that she would blow every last penny on seeing the world. Pascale today teaches French at ITESM in Monterrey and as the years go by, I can only but respect her more and more.
Humanity has been struggling (and still is in some parts of the world) for over 3000 years for a form of government that represents the basic right of self determination (ie. Democracy).
In most countries, one can abstain from exercising their right to vote. Abstaining from vote is not the same as voting blank or destroying your ballot. In the latter cases you are stating that you do not believe that any party represents your interests, and you are not giving any party the honor of your vote. You are voting which means that you are supporting the system and basic democratic values and you are making a statement.
Abstaining means that you are not exercising your right to vote, that you are not participating in the democratic system (“the ancient Athenians stated that a citizen that does not vote is a useless citizen”) and that participating in the democracy is not worth your time. Abstaining is not a show of complaint against the political parties, but a show of complaint and no confidence in the actual democratic system.
There may come a day (and may that day never come) when someone or something may say that perhaps its time to change our form of government. That someone or something may say that because only a small percentage of the population votes, the present form of government is simply not working at a time when the country needs a sound working system to manage perceived calamities . Perhaps this new type of authority may actually organize itself in such a way that its members do vote, but also discourage other parties and people from voting (ie. encourage them to abstain).
The result will be that this authority may be voted in (since most of the population doesn’t vote but the ones that do (although a small minority) vote for this new authority) and then by “democratic means” may proceed to change the system to suit itself for the long term. I mean since no one cares and everyone abstains who will bother to stop them?
Of course it’s your democratic right to abstain (in countries where this is not illegal) but events some day may take an unexpected turn.
And even though you may then try to complain, no one may be listening anymore.
Since we’re on the home stretch regarding the Euroelections (GO VOTE DOG !), an examination of the different parties and their correlation to economics and other things, is in order.
Smith (right wing): Adam Smith and his invisible hand implies that everything should be left to the market, with minimum government intervention. Basically regardless of the economic circumstance, the market eventually reaches a state of equilibrium and self corrects. This economic ideology is Darwinism in its most basic form, which means that those with cunning and business acumen and that take the necessary risk stand a chance of doing very well, moderately well, bad and very bad. These investors/entrepreneurs need someone to carry out their plans, and that someone is the employee, otherwise known as labor (machines are also something that is slowly fitting into the picture with they’re accompanying technical support etc..). Even though Adam Smith deals with labor in its most basic form (unskilled workers) so that this labor can be readily called upon, dismissed or replaced as soon as possible (and as cheaply as possible), labor can be generalized to anyone that works for someone else as an employee (that is why we have blue collar and white collar labor). The Adam Smith approach can also be extended to a win-loose approach in negotiation.
Marx (left wing): In a time where Adam Smith was king, Marx came along and said that if humanity is to have a future, then distribution of wealth should be made extremely fair and that workers should have a say over their future and the future of the state. The way to gain this control is through force. The way to manage the change is through a revolutionary government which will take upon itself to radically transform the existing system to the communist system. In the communist system everyone is equal and everyone works for the common good, ie for everyone else. There is only one party, the communist party which represents the worker class; in the communist system everyone is a worker and the government represents these workers and works in a collective way to ensure a better future for the state, the state being the people. Since wealth is to be distributed equally to all, no one owns anything and everything is owned by the state , but since the state which is controlled by the people’s party is really the people, then everything is controlled by the people. So mi casa es su casa and this also expands to relationships; you cannot say that Martha is your wife (or Gazoo is your husband) since this implies possession and there are no possessions. So it’s a free for all when it comes to babes too! There are various questions that come to mind: Why should the entrepreneur share his wealth since she took all the risks and possessed the required skills to accumulate this wealth, and how much un untrained uneducated worker can cook up a strategy let alone lead a country (don’t take this too literally; some people have a natural gift towards leadership independent of whether they know how to spell or not “Supercalifragilisticepialidocious”)? One of the largest problems with implementing this system is that you end up having a set of people controlling the state, which brings up the age old problem of “who will watch the watchers” (unless you’re lucky enough to have truly incorruptible leaders ie. a one in 3 billion chance). Finally, if you witness a communist leader going to church, driving an expensive car, having a large estate and sending his/her kids to an expensive private school, then think twice about how much he/she and the party they’re leading practice what they preach (and how they handle all those dues they collect from their followers).
Keynes (center): Middle ground represented in politics by the 20th century socialist party (not by Bernstein and his followers; same name but important changes). This implies that you have a market system but government moves in to correct imperfection. So Darwinism in a controlled form. Why? Well first of all the market isn’t perfect. Secondly the vast majority of the population does not do very well, (or care to do well ) in business so indeed the vast majority is labor, and thirdly even though wealth is still in the hands of those that know how to accumulate it (and this isn’t the vast majority), the vast majority is still the vast majority and if you really piss them off (and this has happened in the past many many times) then you’re headed for trouble (the guillotine, the communist revolution and much much more). So don’t piss them off, give them bread and distribute wealth so that yes you can stay rich, but ensure that everyone else doesn’t starve. It’s a way of distributing things while preserving the existing political, social and class structure. Representative of this is collective bargaining and win win negotiation with an emphasis on the Nash Equilibrium. Problem with the center is that you need both a right wing and a left wing in order to have a center.
Since may have sent mails asking me to explain the Nash Equilibrium in a none mathematical way, I’ll refer to the movie “A Wonderful Mind”.
The Nash Equilibrium known as Win Win negotiation and resolving the Prisoner’s Dilemma:
Say that Dimitris, Tonester, Heckle and Vangelis are in a bar drinking it up and toasting their friendship. Then these five (yes five !) babes walk in where the most gorgeous of them all is the tall American blonde blue eyed babe. Well right of the bat D, T, H and V being “friends” try to figure out ways to shaft each other to gain exclusive access to the blonde. So as each of the guys in turn come on to the blond, the blond girl’s assets immediately rise (resulting in the lady’s aloofness) and she rejects all four. The other women seeing that D, T, H and V all went for the blonde, immediately also reject the four Caballeros since the women do not want to be the second choice. So Dimitris, Tonester, Heckle and Vangelis, the loosers that they are, end up taking cold showers instead of hitting home runs.
Now if the four dudes were proponents of the common good (instead of just looking out for themselves) they would have initially agreed to hit on the remaining four girls, one caballero per girl, and totally disregard the blond girl. This would increase dramatically their chances of scoring since anyone that knows anything about hitting on women in a bar realizes that the four girls being friends would be more open to dating four guys who are also friends since the goods are equally distributed in a secure way. So instead of acting independently, acting collectively would’ve resulted in a much more pleasurable night for all (even for the blonde babe since the last of the gang (ok this is a new variable that wasn’t introduced before; but hey we just opened up the Nash world to exogenous factors) Alfred P Neuman who came in late and who is just as conniving as D,T, H, V can now hit with on the blonde with high chances of success (no aloofness here, she’s all alone).)
It’s a nice piece of work, with elegant mathematics, and sure beats modeling the random walk of a group of pigeons chasing bread crumbs.
The business news of the week is that GM has hit a brick wall. GM and American car manufacturers have been going down since the 70s mostly due to Japanese and European competition, and the ensuing and continuing oil crisis.
The car industry is a saturated market.
You have about 6 or 7 major car companies, all producing the same thing, positioning in the same way their product lines and for the same target markets. This is reinforced by the fact that a new entrant can gain market share only by using price as the competitive variable instead of innovation. And when you see price as the prime competitive advantage (whether its cars were talking about, telecom services or whatever) then you know that the industry’s in trouble.
So what happened to GM has nothing to do with the market economy going astray. What happened to GM only reinforces the fact that things are working as they should be working. There are too many players producing the same thing, and management lacks the necessary vision, initiative and innovation to come up with something that addresses the needs of the times.
Of course we are also talking about a structural change in the economy (within the same economic system) which means that if one wants to make money, one has to address these new market needs by creating new industries. So you have the problem of a massive workforce populating the car industry, and government moving in to keep this old industry going to ensure that this workforce doesn’t end up in the street , something that would create a macroeconomic, political and social turmoil. Since government can’t, in the short term, automatically move this workforce to the new economy, it prefers to keep it occupied in the old.
GM was the leading US automaker for decades. Its leadership reflected the sign of the times in a postwar America (“What’s good for GM is good for America”). Some even say that GM, and the car industry in general, used various political maneuvers to gain the upper hand in a growing economy (using its clout to keep sabotage city transport in order to encourage purchases of new automobiles as well as building a time limit in its products so that they break down after 3 years, forcing you to buy a new one etc..). That may be so but the fact still remains that at one time, GM was innovative both in financial and organizational matters. GMs decentralized organization was a model for many industries (there’s a reason why there’s such a thing as the SLOAN School of Management). So was its marketing strategy (using proven technology albeit old, making the car reflective of a lifestyle and positioning these product lines to address the particular lifestyle).
This kind of vision ran out of steam in the 70s and GM has been running on momentum since the late 70s early 80s. So the economic system hasn’t collapsed; its just that the times have caught up and surpassed the auto industry.
In order to understand where the economic system is heading, one needs to understand how this economic system ( and related political system) came into place ie. understand the ideologies (there’s always an ideology) that brought about the present market system.
The chief ideology that brought about the present capitalist (or market) system goes by the name of empiricism which reflects the psyche of the merchant and professional class ( in contracts to the nobility and working class). The turmoil and different tribulations that marked the rise of the merchant/professional calls (the bourgeoisie) also brought about scientific experimentation, the age of enlightenment and rational thought, and these “currents” were translated into signs and symbols (you always need some sort of tangible trademark to reflect the signs of the times). This new thought reached its peak in the French and American revolution (a revolution lead by lawyers and other professionals and professional associations and their related societies) and has been struggling ever since.
The French and American (or rather the American and French) revolutions were revolutions triggered by few by using many to achieve the goals of most in a weighted manner (the weight factor is correlated to the class system). These revolutions go hand in hand with the market system, the first French charter of human rights (which reflect the rights of the individual but do not address the issue of what happens when these rights infringe on the rights of the many ie. Adam Smith vs. Keynes (or Marx for the more radical), win lose negotiation as opposed to win-win negotiation (ie. The Nash Equilibrium)).
The strategic advantage of this economic system is the accompanying political system known as “democracy”. A democracy surpasses all other present day forms of government by efficiently addressing on detail, a detail that is crucial to any thriving society. This detail is known as “managed change”.
Plato stated a couple of thousand years ago that the best ruler is the perfect ruler. The main problem of any administration is the problem of who will monitor this administration and ensure that this administration is doing what it’s suppose to be doing (“who will watch the watcher?”).Since only God is perfect it necessarily follows that humans cannot be perfect rulers; power corrupts the best of us.
The only way to address this so far is to keep someone in power long enough to pass required policies, and have the option to remove them from power. Black ball them and vote them out !
Democracy has proven so far to be the only system conceived by humanity that handles the issue of keeping administrations in check, this by having timely elections (companies don’t have such efficient systems and this in large explains why older companies who have semi permanent CEO’s and boards eventually go extinct as markets change; they stagnate).
Any other system that bases itself on a permanent set of rulers (anything over 10 years is permanent so if you’re gonna do a revolution and you put a revolutionary government in place that is still in place after a couple of years, you don’t have a revolution anymore…you have an institutionalized revolution which becomes an institution and which ends up as a stagnating political, and economic entity) will eventually go astray.
So think twice before abstaining from elections whether Euro elections or otherwise.
Sweden has discovered a 16 year old Einstein, the offspring of Iraqi refugees. 16 year old Mohamed Altoumaimi has conceived a procedure that produces and simplifies a Bernoulli number series. Because of his work and his general aptitude towards mathematics, Mohammed has been offered admission to Uppsala University.
71% of British citizens state that French women are sexier that their English counterparts, while 66% state that French women are better dressers and 92% state that generally French women are thinner than their British counterparts.
Of course judging from the pic below, British women have nothing really to worry about; stats are always misleading.
And talking about the picture above, transparency prior to the euro election is becoming the talk of the town. While Greece is till brewing with the Siemens case, the British FSA has partially opened its cards and presented various scenarios about the state of the kingdom in 2011. The various plausible economic scenarios for 2011 include a 50% drop in real estate, and a 12% unemployment rate (the Phillips curve is holding and motionless since inflation will be under control; sorry no stagflation this time around). The FSA has mandated a crash test on the British banks (RBS and Lloyds) but refuses to disclose the results, raising suspicions of concealment of information.
For the first time in history the Chinese have surpassed the west (Greece) in the purchase of second hand commercial vessels. According to Allied Shipbroking, for the first couple of months of 2009 the Chinese have bought 66 ships (695,3 mUSD) while the Greeks are in close second with 64 registered purchases (944,4mUSD). The total number of registered purchases for the first five months of 2009 come around 427 used ships (5,3 BUSD) which include 301 freighters, 101 tankers, 20 carrier vessels and 5 ships for cold storage purposes (ie. Floating refrigerators). Traditionally the Greeks have been first in tonnage, the Fins a close second and Japan a tight third.
Bloomberg states that GM is expected to announce bankruptcy on June the 1st. This means that GM will probably be nationalized by the US government (did you ever think you’d live to see the day!) which implies about a 70% controlling interest. This also spawned further outrage by the German government on the implication that Opel (GM Germany and Europe) may require a further infusion of about 300M. On the other hand GM china seems to be doing very well. Sort of reminds you of Ruppel which kept on fighting after Tsolakoglu had singed unconditional surrender to Dietrich.
Folli Follie has shown an increase in sales of about 11% (so not everyone’s going bankrupt as you can see) and we’re sure here at edinpress that lovely Eleana is surely smiling.
The AOL – Time Warner merger is going to hell (recall that the buyout by AOL has tagged as the sale of the century; AOL in 2001 bought Time Warner for a whopping 124 BUSD). Time Warner announced its spinoff from AOL. Also AOL seems to be floundering since in 2002 AOL had 26,7 M registered users while the first quarter of 2009 witnessed AOL having about 6,3 M registered users. The drop is due mainly to the fact that AOL internet accessed was supported by dial up access. The arrival of fast internet (through DSL / cable mediums) put the AOL customer base on freefall. Historically, any one involved seriously with strategy will tell you that company mergers or buyouts may work out on paper but rarely in practice (by rarely we mean that they never meet their projected life span and financial goals). The major reason (something that the bean counters and penny pinchers never take into account) is the human factor and the inability of human resources for various reasons to implement the “new ” corporate culture that will lead help achieve the new goals.
Finally, we have 24 degrees today in Athens around the Kalamaki area. Summer as can be seen, is around the corner.
Youth is a mosaic of images that generate impressions which form a composition matrix of one’s life.
Mrs. Schechter was my fourth grade teacher in Guy Drummond School Outremont.
Mrs. Schechter was the kind of teacher (a breed now extinct) which infused in young people the kind of optimism that is necessary to deal with the challenges later faced in any life and career.
Mrs. Schechter at that time expected her first born.
We lived in hodgepodge neighborhood of Greeks, Italians, Jews, French and English Canadians. We regularly played hockey in the back alley “lanes” (where the municipality picked up the trash) and “chase” in the street.
Mrs. Schechter lived in a modern building (which she owned) close to the corner of Van Horne and Querbes.
She would come home about an hour or two after us, her students, and she would always break a warm smile that brought the sun out.
She cared.
The days turned to months and the months turned to years.
We still played hockey and chase.
Mrs. Schechter still came home an hour later than us, but her colorful clothes gave way to black.
I remember, during my last days in Querbes, Mrs. Schechter, dressed in black mourning the loss of her beloved, pushing a baby carriage, in the afternoon and during the weekends.
On Querbes Street.
She still managed to break a smile, albeit for a second or two, to her former students.
With 1976 and the eminent change in Quebec politics, Mrs. Schechter put her building up for sale, and moved away like so many English speaking Quebecers.
Humanity has been searching for some sort of evidence (the missing link..) that connects homo sapiens to the basic ancestral life forms that once populated this planet. We shudder at the thought of being the result of some genetic experiment performed by higher life forms.
People many times attempt to trace their origins, their family tree. Many go through insurmountable difficulties to seek out and bond with their natural parents.
Many Nations who cannot define their heritage, attempt to steal the history and traditions of other Nations.
Companies that have somehow gone astray, return to their core values and core competencies in an effort to curb losses and rediscover the road to profitability.
There’s an email going around that a well known powerhouse in the mobile communication world, a builder of mobile phones and platforms, is giving free laptops to those that forward twenty or more emails of the received letter.
The main idea is that if you spread the message via email (virally) then brand awareness will increase geometrically. For example user A sends 20 mails, and the 20 users that receive the mails send 20 mails each..so you get the point.
First of all, all of the major mobile terminal communication companies (sony ericsson, lg, samsung etc.. etc..) rely more on mass media for brand awareness than viral methods (much much more efficient..believe me). Of course word of mouth helps (I like this phone so I recommend it to friends) but since the purchase risk is low (the cost of a phone is low compared to the risk factor; its not a car and its not a house) lifestyle is more important than a recommendation since the product can, and usually is changed, in a short time (due to lifestyle mostly). Mass media is very efficient in projecting a form of life style.
Secondly, if they gave out a laptop for every 20 emails sent, then these companies would eventually (probably within 3 months) go bankrupt since you’re talking about giving a laptop, for free, to the whole world in a very short timeframe…unlikely that the board or the shareholders would approve.
Thirdly, the email is equivalent to payola…ie. they’re openly bribing you to pass on the good word . A definite no for any corporation.
So it doesn’t take PhD to figure this scam out…Dooh!
Note : a noteworthy aspect of this particular scam is the excellent viral component that’s built in to the communication. You have content (the message) and you have motivation to pass the message to a number of people (the laptop if you pass the message on). So the receiver has a piece of the action if he/she passes on this message.
This site will offer a free handbook describing Long Term Evolution in about 2 weeks time.
So if you’re interested in next generation mobile communications in general, and Long Term Evolution in particular, check back here in about 2 weeks time and you’ll be able to download the material.
From the commission : Intel got slapped with a 1,06 billion euro fine for anti competitive monopoly like business practices. This is the largest fine of its sort in the history of the EU. The commission declared that Intel is using its dominant position in the microprocessor market to trumple over its competition, especially the smaller AMD (the commission’s decision was based on an initial lawsuit filed by AMD back in 2000). The commission declared that Intel was actually inducing large pc manufacturers (ex: Dell, HP,Acer,Lenovo, NEC) to favor Intel microprocessors over those of the competitor by using business practices such as special offers, vouchers, credit notes etc… For these special offers to take effect, the manufactures had to deploy Intel processors in about 80% of their manufactured goods (ex: pcs). Intel business practices also restricted the channels where the particular enterprise could sell the pcs that did not include Intel processors (ex: only through the internet) including an agreement that delayed the offering of the products hosting competitor devices 6 months after the equivalent Intel product hit the market.
The commission claims that Intel also financed large retail chains such as Saturn and MediaMarkt to carry only equipment that hosted Intel processors.
This means that if they catch you downloading (through torrents or any other way) material that is regarded as pirated, and violating anti piracy legislation, your internet access gets cut.
There are millions of people (composers, artists, authors etc…) that are entitled to have efficient and fluid protection when it comes to guarding their intellectual property. Granted!
The way that this is tackled by governments however leaves much to be desired.
For example say I buy a book. When I buy a book I buy the right to read the book but in many ways NOT to copy and distribute, plagiarize or change the contents of the book in any way (unless I have the specific ok from the publisher and/or author depending on the contract the author has with the publisher).
If someone copies the book, illegally and gives me a photocopied version then if I do proceed to photocopy the photocopy (remember I don’t have the book; I have an illegal copy of the book) then I may be or may not be breaking a law.
Now say that I memorize the book (and it is possible since the Greeks for ages were reciting memorized versions of the Iliad and Odyssey before Pissistratos put the stuff down in written form) and recite its contents (ie. distribution through word of mouth) to other interested parties who geometrically do the same thing to others. Am I breaking a law? Yes? Sez who? I am breaking no law and if someone tries to stop me from expressing my right to speech then they are stepping over my basic freedom of speech.
When I illegally copy a dvd (ie. I crack and rip) then the way things stand I am breaking copyright laws and infringing on intellectual property rights (the same applies if I scan a book onto hard disk). If I get caught in the process then indeed I am eligible for litigation. Of course if someone caught me doing this on my pc then they are violating my privacy and they are also eligible for a mighty lawsuit.
So it is virtually impossible to catch someone ripping or illegally copying material without violating that someone’s right to privacy.
The minute the material is in digital form, then I am not so sure one can persecute the person actually violating the copyright laws. Remember what we said above about the Iliad and the Odyssey?
So the problem is that governments are taking measures to tackle a problem that exists as a problem because the whole approach is wrong. Governments are trying to use outdated legislation and practices to address new issues that come from new situations. In the same way that prohibition addressed an issue that could’ve been addressed in a better way if some thought was put into the matter beforehand, and if the government was in touch with the times (and perhaps avoided the Great Depression altogether).
Besides, restricting internet access on pirate downloads means that some smart guy will come up with a piece of code that will somehow fool Big Brother into not detecting that you’re actually downloading the pirated stuff. So, as in prohibition, a new industry will flourish that will probably facilitate illegal downloads.
So protecting intellectual property rights is important. It will remain to be seen whether the current way of approaching this issue bears fruit.
Video communicaton through fixed online applications has become very, very popular (ex: video skype). Video communication through telecommunication broadband systems has not become very popular (whether fixed or mobile).
Ok, now let’s correct the hickup in the previous statement: Video communication has become popular over telecom networks since skype and a host of other such application software do indeed rely on the telecommunication network.
The question is how did skype and all the other peer to peer applications manage to catch a market in say five years, a market that the traditional telecom companies have been addressing for the last 40 years (remember ISDN video tv? and of course we now have 3G (and later LTE) video call capabilities) without much success.
Premise : Video communication does exist as a succesful service, but through advertising based peer to peer applications that are independent from the telecom providers service offering and billing system!
Why?
One possible answer is that skype (and all the other skypes) offered it for free. The other answer is that they offered it for free to the users that could not afford to pay for the service anyway, the youth segment (well most could but you know..). Another factor that comes to play is that most of these peers understood that this segment relied on the “socializing factor”. Skype (and later applications such as facebook, gmail, msn etc.. ) built in a”gossipy virality” into the actual applications, allowing people to communicate, share, coordinate, incorporate and generally get involved; The key advantage with all these applications is the “social butterfly” aspect of the application. Another advantage is that the users got something in return for actually promoting the application to their friends, family and peers. Inother words the application contained a built in viral component.
So while the previous strategy focussed on interconnecting customers (an older generation that really had no time, or care to watch itself on a screen) through video, or mobile video, as is done through voice, the peer to peer applications focussed on using voice, video , text and anything else that was/is at their disposal as enblers to allow people to group into “tribes”. This satisfied an individual’s need to socialize and be part of a group, and simultaneously nurtured their personality’s self actualization factor.
(to be fair to the pervasive telecom network, technological limitations were indeed an obstruction since SS7 and ATM based ISDN network let much to be desired regarding general interconnectivity, something that is crucial in setting up a online “tribe”. Also, the initial “party lines” were a step in the right direction, they were indeed free (either on purpose or by accident) but the revenue models in existence at the time could not capitalize on such trends. This of course is an oversimplification of the situation, but will be corrected in the future as this journal will dwelve in detail as to how things panned out, and why).
Mme Reding is puting the sqeeze on any company that takes information privacy for granted.
To begin with, the UK is being summoned by the European Court for violation of information privacy, since a number of UK companies have been illegally accessing private data and usage habits, through a piece of software known as Phorm, and using this information for target marketing. This data accumulation was done without the users’ knowledge or permission.
Mme Reding was firm on the commission’s policies of information privacy, and warned the member states that infringements to the present laws will not be tolerated.
Software such as Phorm, register internet usage activity and has been widely used by a number of companies, including BT, Virgin Media and Talk-Talk.
Mme Reding also called on social media companies such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to beef up their security mechanisms, especially when it comes to data pertaining to minors.
Last February the commission had received commitments from a number of corporations on improving their information security systems, and is currently awaiting (until the end of April) the results.
Dr. Robert KaplanHarvard Business School strategy guru and conceiver of the Balanced Scorecardstates that company management is so focused on day to day operations and short term sales, and devotes little if any time to strategic thinking..
This symptom may be diagnosed on the corporate level as well as the middle management level, and its results can be witnessed over time as the company looses market share to other more focused companies.
For example the technical department of a company pushing networks may be buried on handling customer requests and problem solving technical issues, while foregoing any serious considerations on overall network evolution and what piece of the customer’s network the supplier wants, can or is should have to remain in the game, in the long run. The end result is while this supplier is getting bits and bytes, another supplier through careful maneuvering manages to secure crucial network entities and eventually gains hold of the direction of the customer’s network, and of course of the most profitable components. Thus the concept of strategic network evolution.
The same applies to the strategic position of a subsidiary vis-à-vis the corporate biosphere.
Business is a chess game, and those that plan a few steps ahead are always, force majeure, ahead of the competition.
Of course in order to play chess, and to play it well, you need qualified chess players that are focused on long term results rather than short term sales and a “today is important and tomorrow will take care of itself” attitude.
Dr. Kaplan clearly emphasizes that a qualified upper management must meet at least on a monthly basis and devote time and resources to conceiving and maintaining a strategy.
“Strategy without tactics is the long way to victory. Tactics without strategy is the long way to failure.” Sun Tzu, the art of war
Technology can help in forging a medium to long term strategy. Technology can help corporations map out their strategy and see a visual representation of the strategic plan, use cross correlations to see how influence factors interact and generally monitor, analyze , design based on agreed visions, and correct any course deviations. Tools such as dashboards and scorecards allow a company to monitor what goes on within the organization, which areas on which time periods over or under perform, and with the help of decomposition trees and maps, why things occur the way the occur.
The following video summarizes the above discussion:
For those returning to Athens Greece from a trip to Mexico, a trip that was realized in the last couple of weeks (last flight from Mexico to Athens was believed to be Friday the 24rth of April) and who fear, or have cause to fear, anything regarding the Mexican Swine Flu, please be advised to contact immediatly the operations center for disease containment (εθνικό κέντρο επιχειρήσεων υγείας) at
Aston Hayes worked in a Telecom company. Aston Hayes was a programming genius. Aston Hayes had a knack for new programming languages and new programming methods.
Aston bought a book on a new programming language. It cost him 20 USD, written by lovely Laura and good ol Head of Caddon Water. Aston spent a week learning the language and all the ins and outs (and I mean all the ins and outs including hacks, distributed architectures, Trojans and Danaans etc..).
Aston then sought out a student (seek and thou shalt find), a rich dude that wanted badly to get certified in this language.
Aston charged him 1000 a month (about 50 us per 3 hours and had about 3 3hr sessions per week) and held on to him for 17 months. The kid became and ace and got certified scoring about 95% on the certification exam, then with references got a job; the kid now is a top notch programmer earning good bucks, plus some more bucks doing freelance.
So Aston, programmer genius and entrepreneur, got a return of about 5000% on the first month of his initial investment, and overall return of about 85000%.
By now most people have heard of the Pirate Bay verdict being “guilty of copyright infringement”. The verdict will be appealed and torrent users are already massing to support the world’s biggest torrent site. Remember these are also voters and the Euroelections are coming up.
The issue with the Pirate Bay reflects more lawmakers’ inability to deal with the digital divide, than the issue of copyright. Problems could have been avoided altogether if lawmakers kept with the times, or even better yet, ahead of the times instead of watching things happen, saying “what happened”, and then moving in to fill the holes.
Sort of the way they dealt with prohibition and the way they’re dealing with drugs.
The point of the matter is that digital reality is indeed a reality whether old style manufacturing likes it or not.
While industries are arguing about Blu ray and Dvd, industry hasn’t realized that you don’t need either.
You can download one way or another, paid or pirated, a torrent of your favorite film, put it on an external drive, move your drive to your HD tv set, connect it via an accessory that converts the avi to a tv signal, and watch the film via your usb connection. Of course you can watch directly on your computer without anything too, but for those that like their huge tv screens, avi to tv converters exist at about 99 euro.
You can also be cool and add a tv card to your computer motherboard and watch everything on your computer, including the ability to record on your hard disk.
Full editing features are included on all such accessories which means you can watch a great movie, minus the violence and sex scenes when the whole family is watching, and include back these same scenes when the kids are asleep.
No dvd and no dvd players required. Portability through slim external drives and usb sticks too !
That’s what its all about ,and that’s what it will be about (and more, oh so more !) and I’m not really sure governments and lawmakers have understood this.
Sort of the same way that telecom companies haven’t understood that skype, facebook etc… are really in competition with them…students gossiping over facebook would’ve used their cell phones if there was no facebook…wouldn’t they?
Remember the partylines we had in America (Montreal had a great one…great place to make friends)?
Well , what do you think facebook is all about (and much much more..)?
LONDON (Reuters) – Physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of “A Brief History of Time” who is almost completely paralyzed by motor neurone disease, has been urgently admitted to hospital, Cambridge University said on Monday.
Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to a local hospital in Cambridge, where he is a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.
“Professor Hawking is very ill and has been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke’s Hospital,” the university said.
A university spokesman said his condition was described as comfortable and that he would be kept in hospital overnight.
Hawking, who is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer, had been ill for a couple of weeks, with his condition deteriorating since he returned from a trip to the United States at the weekend, a source said.
He canceled an appearance at Arizona State University on April 6 due to a chest infection. A pre-recorded lecture was played to a science conference instead.
He has previously been treated for pneumonia and the source said it appeared his latest illness was related to the chest infection, although he stressed there was no diagnosis yet.
The head of Cambridge’s applied mathematics department expressed hope that Hawking would recover.
“Professor Hawking is a remarkable colleague,” said Peter Haynes. “We all hope he will be amongst us again soon.”
GLOBAL RENOWN
Hawking is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. He achieved global recognition with the publication in 1988 of “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe.
Hawking began suffering from motor neurone disease in his early 20s but went on to establish himself as one of the world’s leading scientific authorities, and is constantly called upon to comment on new discoveries in astronomy and physics.
He raised his profile in popular culture with guest appearances in “Star Trek” and the cartoons “Futurama” and “The Simpsons.” In 2007, he took a zero-gravity flight over the Atlantic Ocean in an adapted Boeing 727 jet.
Since 1974, the Oxford-educated scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics — Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.
As a result of his research, Hawking proposed a model of the universe based on two concepts of time: “real time,” or time as human beings experience it, and “imaginary time,” the time on which the world may really run.
“The universe is self-contained, and without boundary, in imaginary time. However, in real time, the universe will appear to begin at the Big Bang (the explosion thought to be at the origin of the universe),” Hawking has said.
“The laws of physics will hold everywhere, so it is not necessary to believe that God intervened to set it going.”
Motor neurone disease is a catch-all name for a family of muscle wasting diseases that includes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease in the United States.
Although Hawking is virtually paralyzed, he has a slow-progressive form of the disease.
Hawking, who is due to step down as Cambridge’s Lucasian professor of Mathematics when he turns 70, has been married twice. He has three children by his first wife.
(Reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Charles Dick)
The Honorable George Papandreou (or Giorgos as he is commonly called by Greeks), President of Pasok and Socialist International, is indeed a rarity amongst present day politicians.
George is a man that has the uncanny ability to circumvent the layers of administration encompassing any public office, reach out to the common man, and thus feel the pulse of the Nation.His persona radiates a unique blend of charisma, stamina, resourcefulness, vision, patience and perseverance.
Politics they say is a jungle.
A jungle made up of a million different plants trees and trunks.
Some of these plants have a brief day in the sun, they flower quickly but they can’t seem to sustain, so they wither away.
Paul Krugman : Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve released the minutes of the most recent meeting of its open market committee – the group that sets interest rates. Most press reports focused either on the Fed’s downgrade of the near-term outlook or on its adoption of a long-run 2 percent inflation target. But my eye was caught by the following chilling passage (Yes, things are so bad that the summarized musings of central bankers can keep you up at night): “All participants anticipated that unemployment would remain substantially above its longer-run sustainable rate at the end of 2011, even absent further economic shocks; a few indicated that more than five to six years would be needed for the economy to converge to a longer-run path characterized by sustainable rates of output growth and unemployment and by an appropriate rate of inflation.”
So people at the Fed are troubled by the same question I’ve been obsessing on lately: What’s supposed to end this slump? No doubt this, too, shall pass – but how, and when? To appreciate the problem, you need to know that this isn’t your father’s recession. It’s your grandfather’s, or maybe even (as I’ll explain) your great-great-grandfather’s. Your father’s recession was something like the severe downturn of 1981-1982. That recession was, in effect, a deliberate creation of the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates to as much as 17 percent in an effort to control runaway inflation. Once the Fed decided that we had suffered enough, it relented, and the economy quickly bounced back. Your grandfather’s recession, on the other hand, was something like the Great Depression, which happened in spite of the Fed’s efforts, not because of them. When a stock market bubble and a credit boom collapsed, bringing down much of the banking system with them, the Fed tried to revive the economy with low interest rates – but even rates barely above zero weren’t low enough to end a prolonged era of high unemployment.
Now we’re in the midst of a crisis that bears an eerie, troubling resemblance to the onset of the Depression; interest rates are already near zero, and still the economy plunges. How and when will it all end? To be sure, the Obama administration is taking action to help the economy, but it’s trying to mitigate the slump, not end it. The stimulus bill, on the administration’s own estimates, will limit the rise in unemployment but fall far short of restoring full employment. The housing plan announced this week looks good, in the sense that it will help many homeowners, but it won’t spur a new housing boom. What, then, will actually end the slump? Well, the Great Depression did eventually come to an end, but that was thanks to an enormous war, something we’d rather not emulate. The slump that followed Japan’s “bubble economy” also eventually ended, but only after a lost decade. And when Japan finally did start to experience some solid growth, it was thanks to an export boom, which was in turn made possible by vigorous growth in the rest of the world – not an experience anyone can repeat when the whole world is in a slump. So will our slump go on forever? No. In fact, the seeds of eventual recovery are already being planted. Consider housing starts, which have fallen to their lowest level in 50 years. That’s bad news for the near term. It means that spending on construction will fall even more. But it also means that the supply of houses is lagging behind population growth, which will eventually prompt a housing revival. Or consider the plunge in auto sales. Again, that’s bad news for the near term. But at current sales rates, as the finance blog Calculated Risk points out, it would take about 27 years to replace the existing stock of vehicles. Most cars will be junked long before that, either because they’ve worn out or because they’ve become obsolete, so we’re building up a pent-up demand for cars. The same story can be told for durable goods and assets throughout the economy: Given time, the current slump will end itself, the way slumps did in the 19th century. As I said, this may be your great-great-grandfather’s recession. But recovery may be a long time coming. The closest 19th-century parallel I can find to the current slump is the recession that followed the Panic of 1873. That recession did eventually end without any government intervention, but it lasted more than five years, and another prolonged recession followed just three years later. You can see, then, why some Fed officials are so pessimistic.
Let’s be clear: The Obama administration’s policy initiatives will help in this difficult period – especially if the administration bites the bullet and takes over weak banks.
But still I wonder: Who’ll stop the pain?
Note (from the Dark Press): One point (and there are many others as we shall see in a future article) that differentiates this crisis from the crash of ‘29, is that today there is much more available “cash”. For example, the Chinese are on a “European buying spree“ . We may see more of this “help” coming from other cash rich countries In the crisis of ‘29, the cash crunch smashed into the brick wall of the communist front (about 1/2 the world was red in those days; or on the way to becoming red) so there were not that many options for cash infusion. Since today’s “pyramid” is much more limited than the availability of cash, we can be sure that things will recover.
The next time this happens we can expect many more players (including those that have just discovered the wonders of market economies) which implies an even harder crash. The question of the millenium will then be, who will then supply the necessary cash infusion to “oil” the system?
Big Rupert Murdoch sez that once he starts charging subscriptions for his online media, he’s gonna block Google from accessing his sites content. (ie. remove stories from Google search index). This implies that content from sites such as The Sun, The Times and the Wall Street Journal will not show up in our search results thus encouraging people to pay for online content. He’s also gonna lobby so that other online news media pursue the same strategy. This means that eventually, if things pan out the way he plans, Google search results will be poorer thus undermining the value of the search engine, and Google’s business value. In recent months, Murdoch and his boyz stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of “kleptomania” and acting as a “parasite” for including News Corp content in its Google News pages. Murdoch has been turned off by the open access to information that currently exists in the www as well as by the fact that his inet acquisition MySpace has struggled in the face of competition from Facebook in recent years, and is due to fall short of its targets in a lucrative search deal with Google – a slip that could cost the site more than $100m in payments from the internet advertising giant. Some critics of this strategy claim that Murdoch has got the wrong handle on internet business and doesn’t understand that search engines enhance the value of web sites like the WSJ through
NSN is planning on cutting about 7700 workers from its 64000 strong workforce. This amounts to about 8% of the total workforce and will save NSN about 500M euro per annum up until the end of 2011. This decision marks a second wave of job slashing in the last two years.
Every once in a while we have the opportunity witness mechanisms of change at work and invoking disruption mechanisms whose after-effects are felt long after. For example, 
On the other hand 
Well it was bound to happen !
Sound organization design implies efficient information flow and fluid adaptability to fluctuating market conditions, while simultaneous protection of internal corporate functions.
Well, this is a first !
But ok, the company always was in the midst of management turmoil resembling greco-roman wrestling matches and then after the investment funds took over, 
In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. At the very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fear of creating a public backlash. But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’s not forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sector is rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Street paychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deploying its political clout to block even the most minimal reforms. The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’s selfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himself is ready, even now, to take on the bankers.
lobbyists, is running against the proposed creation of an agency to protect consumers against financial abuses, such as loans whose terms they don’t understand. The chamber’s ads, declared Mr. Summers, are “the financial-regulatory equivalent of the death-panel ads that are being run with respect to health care.”
bankers are paid. What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.
George Papandreou, the President of Socialist International is now the new Prime Minister of the Hellenic republic.
There is a strong possibility that information, in the near future, will be stored, managed and maintained in huge information storage facilities.
A particular company will outsource its information needs to one of these facilities, and will not bother with maintaining any storage facilities on site.
Let’s talk about the 
suppliers; say from the far east) started coming in. In addition 
value chain including supplier price squeezing etc.. Now all this did not result in any change in the social surplus; the wealth redistribution and the necessary changes brought about a new industry equilibrium; in other words above normal profits started becoming normal profits. As a matter of fact, regardless of who had a bigger piece 
of the surplus, society benefited as whole from all aspects including financial (a new source of investment wealth), health (mobile e-health), business (e-commerce), socializing, and security (your car broke down on 635 E from Forth Worth to Dallas at 3 AM; mobile 911 with location based services etc…). Sure, some contracts were renegotiated but so what? Employment was steady if not increasing and service continued to improve !
It’s easy to to adopt the policy of avoiding risk at all costs, that whenever possible, the products you launch or the engagements you have should be flawless and without downside.
The current financial crunch has taken a heavy toll on today’s business environment and has forced corporations to seek nontraditional ways of minimizing costs while concurrently maximizing productivity and general efficiency. One of the heaviest contributors to total fixed costs is of course office space.
some sort of permanent working space whether it’s an office or a desk. For an office worker, typical deskwork includes processing documents, emails and phone communication, while daily interactions with co-workers take place through scheduled or ad hoc meetings in fixed meeting rooms or other building areas. Dealings with customers and suppliers is done through fixed building assets including communication and computing devices as well as meeting areas (your or the customer’s office; your or the customer’s conference rooms). Managing the warehouse (if you’re unlucky to have one) is of course another burden that translates to a fixed cost (add to that the inventory costs; if your forecasts were misaligned with market realities then you have quite a situation). Your general building costs which are always reflected in your Year to Yield and annual income statements are in the short term independent of your business reality and are thus always present whether you’re in business, or quietly going out of business.
environment through a host of new applications (ex. 
Ubiquitous radio access converged with the fixed phone system means that you can start your work day at home or at your preferred location and move as required without disrupting the workflow. You can process all your documents remotely (emails, proposals, tenders, offers) through your company’s vpn , make and receive calls while stationed or on the go, book teleconferences at home or in your car (while taking all necessary traffic precautions) and agree to meet with customers in cafes, posh restaurants or classy hotel lounges. Of course airline bookings and hotel reservations are already a gas with web bookings and e-tickets and can easily be managed from a mobile office.
corporate streamlining will continue to be a predominant force in the next couple of years. Luckily enough communication technology is progressing at such a rate, that if present mobility trends continue, the mobile office will become indispensible factor of day to day business, resulting in improved productivity and rendering fixed office costs a thing of the past. Finally a fully mobile working environment will enhance economic efficiency through reduced frictional unemployment, since relocation will no longer be an employment condition.
Starting Jan 2010 the EU will invest about 18M euro for R+D into 4th generation mobile broadband communication networks.
Ericsson) became the default standard for digital cellular (as opposed to ATT backed FDMA), a standard that also formed the foundation of GSM access (the equivalent American standard is referred to as AMPS/DAMPS). GSM, aside from being state of the art, became an industrialized and fully standardized network easily allowing economies of scale, quick deployment and easy adaptation to market needs, and of course a roadmap allowing the market to see its evolution. From then on Europe
In order to be successful with anything , you have to know who you are (Socrates : 
Spent a week in Lefkada. Great food (fish mostly) cheap prices good service.
Arsonist have struck again, following the same strategy as they did in 2007 setting multiple fires in geographically remote regions, thus aiming to disperse the country’s firefighting force and render its effort fruitless.
The event : This intoxicated British dude comes on to a Cretan girl. She dodges politely his advances but he persists to the point where he tries to slip his hand down her pants. The lady takes a fit, empties the bottle of Sambuca she had on the table over the British guy, and summarily sets him on fire with her lighter. Needless to say the bloke ends up in the hospital and the fiery lady in the hands of police.
Athens, 
blue eyed and with an eliptoid kinda head;Mayan mothers use to implement some sort of cast on their newborn’s head in order to get it to form an elipse, something that the Spanish frowned upon). Or maybe it was just the devil paying the Mayas a visit after having blown away Adam and Eve. Anyway, these features gave the Spanish a strategic advantage since the Mayas and Aztecs initially thought the the Catalans represented the return of their blonde god. BIG MISTAKE !
One the one side 
The news and details of the expected deal were first reported by the AllThingsDigital blog and Advertising Age.
A Russian billionaire visits a remote Greek island that has just past a couple of months of bad weather. Needless to say tourism in the island has been at an all time low and there’s simply no cash to go around; everyone on the island is in debt.
counter and asks the hotel owner to show him around the island. The hotel owner takes the 100 euro and orders the bellboy to take the Russian on a tour.
The Madame take her cabriole Volks and drives off to the classy hotel that started this chain reaction (or multiplication effect), and submits the 100 euro she owed the hotel for the rooms she used in the past to offer her services.
Any robust management system has built in grievance handling provisions. These grievance handling mechanisms are usually independent of the management body and have the chief role of safeguarding the corporation from systemized detrimental principle agent problems (old boys’ networks and golden boy cliques). In other words, the grievance handling mechanism introduces an independent communication channel that allows employees and managers to anonymously voice their opinion and concerns. In the past such 
channels helped bring to light various issues including dubious business practices. If used properly unofficial communication channels protect a company and its shareholders in the same way as official ones, if not more.
use of a communication device be it a fixed or mobile terminal) implies an unofficial grievance communication channel. 
In ancient Athens, the night before the Sicilian expedition, sycophantic activity resulted in the castration of religious statues. One explanation for this was that a group of citizens who were against the expedition had no other channel to voice their complaints and reverted to such activity. Another explanation was that the activity was perpetrated by Alcibiades’ enemies in order to discredit him. Since there was never any root cause analysis performed by the Athenians on these actions, any conclusions are pure speculation. What we do know is that the civil war started a chain reaction that eventually led to the collapse of a great civilization. What we also know is that during the Assembly sessions everyone agreed with General Alcibiades (Groupthink
should be made the subject of study, and some sort of correlation should be sought between the activity and how much the official grievance channels (i.e. the system) actually work; how much faith the population has in the system. In addition the content of this activity (as well as any other information and complaints arising from anonymous channels) should also be studied with the goal of identifying improper procedures and corrupt business or political practices. Usually such practices can only be uncovered through unofficial channels since the official channels are controlled by the individuals that may be implicated in these practices.
Unstructured data; Those two words alone cause turmoil to business practices and render decision makers nervous especially when the monumental amount of customer related information (from all channels, including the Web) comes into play. In fact, the story goes that over 80% of the world’s data is unstructured, and businesses are indeed suffering.
into over 500 functions that help marketers improve the experience for their customers.
Symphony) or FurtWegler conducting the 5th (he gets up on the podium,crosses his arms, looks at the Berliner Philarmonic, blinks, and…pa pa pa paaaaaaaam, the first movement begins).
The concept of bounded rationality, introduced by Herbert Simon, sheds light into the various parameters that affect management decision making and human decision making in general, especially when it comes to purchase decisions.
be rational within limits such as time and cognitive capability. Herbert Simon indicated that there were thus two major causes of bounded rationality:
Rumours have it that Big Bill Gates is interested in purchasing the Golden Greek’s (Aristotle Onassis) Ionian island of 
days ago has speculation brewing and property prices skyrocketing.
There are certain people that put integrity above all other wordly matters. These people cannot be understood by the common penny pincher, or those that place a priority on materialistic fortune.
Mobile terminal manufacturers have finally agreed on a common specification interface for the mobile terminal battery charger.
As we’ve outlined in past entries, peer to peer and distributed agent technologies have many applications, and will have many more.
In the late eighties, global economies were bracing for one more (of the now all too familiar) crisis. The economies of most western countries were overheating (high inflation) and interest rates were on their way up. The market was up to its ears in debt (thanks to 
In the late 80s, legendary CEO 
Let me tell you about Jack.
Of course the years passed and Jack eventually left his multinational, Business wasn’t what it use to be and since it got quite boring, Jack decided to call it quits; of course with a little help. People shy away at leaving their work in their forties, especially in the midst of a crisis, but Jack see’s it as the natural thing to do. His line of business went down, he’s seen the world and savored its flavors, so now its time to do something that will be in tune with the times to come. Jack’s right now on the 
People from all over the world are rushing to secure a place in the opening of the new 
Mrs.Athina Darra inaugurated the “Constantinople 2010″ gala by performing a set of fine Hellenic melodies in the church of Saint Irene in Constantinople (or Istanbul).
The areas that are of interested (for example the online help access) are readily found.
purchase decision, the consumer goes through a process where he/she visualizes using the product and if the particular promotion channel somehow impedes this, then this is one more point towards a negative purchasing decision.
A lot of companies are placing executive control into the hands of bean counters in order to rationalize the costs of the companies, and make some sense out of the continuing financial chaos.
best car in high school was driven by a kid working in the local butcher shop; we’re talking now about a Z28; that’s a 4,2L Camarro (he was Italian, the Greeks preferred the equivalent Pontiac Trans Am) for you Mediterranean home grown boys that like to zoom with 1,8L Subarus…).
Pascale today teaches French at 
Humanity has been struggling (and still is in some parts of the world) for over 3000 years for a form of government that represents the basic right of self determination (ie. Democracy).
In most countries, one can abstain from exercising their right to vote. Abstaining from vote is not the same as voting blank or destroying your ballot. In the latter cases you are stating that you do not believe that any party represents your interests, and you are not giving any party the honor of your vote. You are voting which means that you are supporting the system and basic democratic values and you are making a statement.
Abstaining means that you are not exercising your right to vote, that you are not participating in the democratic system (“the ancient Athenians stated that a citizen that does not vote is a useless citizen”) and that participating in the democracy is not worth your time. Abstaining is not a show of complaint against the political parties, but a show of complaint and no confidence in the actual democratic system.
There may come a day (and may that day never come) when someone or something may say that perhaps its time to change our form of government. That someone or something may say that because only a small percentage of the population votes, the present form of government is simply not working at a time when the country needs a sound working system to manage perceived calamities . Perhaps this new type of authority may actually organize itself in such a way that its members do vote, but also discourage other parties and people from voting (ie. encourage them to abstain).
Since we’re on the home stretch regarding the Euroelections (GO VOTE DOG !), an examination of the different parties and their correlation to economics and other things, is in order.
along and said that if humanity is to have a future, then distribution of wealth should be made extremely fair and that workers should have a say over their future and the future of the state. The way to gain this control is through force. The way to manage the change is through a revolutionary government which will take upon itself to radically transform the existing system to the communist system. In the communist system everyone is equal and everyone works for the common good, ie for everyone else. There is only one party, the communist party which represents the worker class; in the communist system everyone is a worker and the government represents these workers and works in a collective way to ensure a better future for the state, the state being the people. Since wealth is to be distributed equally to all, no one owns anything and everything is owned by the state , but since the state which is controlled by the people’s party is really the people, then everything is controlled by the people. So mi casa es su casa and this also expands to relationships; you cannot say that Martha is your wife (or Gazoo is your husband) since this implies possession and there are no possessions. So it’s a free for all when it comes to babes too! There are various questions that come to mind: Why should the entrepreneur share his wealth since she took all the risks and possessed the required skills to accumulate this wealth, and how much un untrained uneducated worker can cook up a strategy let alone lead a country (don’t take this too literally; some people have a natural gift towards leadership independent of whether they know how to spell or not “Supercalifragilisticepialidocious”)? One of the largest problems with implementing this system is that you end up having a set of people controlling the state, which brings up the age old problem of “who will watch the watchers” (unless you’re lucky enough to have truly incorruptible leaders ie. a one in 3 billion chance). Finally, if you witness a communist leader going to church, driving an expensive car, having a large estate and sending his/her kids to an expensive private school, then think twice about how much he/she and the party they’re leading practice what they preach (and how they handle all those dues they collect from their followers).
but important changes). This implies that you have a market system but government moves in to correct imperfection. So Darwinism in a controlled form. Why? Well first of all the market isn’t perfect. Secondly the vast majority of the population does not do very well, (or care to do well ) in business so indeed the vast majority is labor, and thirdly even though wealth is still in the hands of those that know how to accumulate it (and this isn’t the vast majority), the vast majority is still the vast majority and if you really piss them off (and this has happened in the past many many times) then you’re headed for trouble (the guillotine, the communist revolution and much much more). So don’t piss them off, give them bread and distribute wealth so that yes you can stay rich, but ensure that everyone else doesn’t starve. It’s a way of distributing things while preserving the existing political, social and class structure. Representative of this is collective bargaining and win win negotiation with an emphasis on the Nash Equilibrium. Problem with the center is that you need both a right wing and a left wing in order to have a center.
eyed babe. Well right of the bat D, T, H and V being “friends” try to figure out ways to shaft each other to gain exclusive access to the blonde. So as each of the guys in turn come on to the blond, the blond girl’s assets immediately rise (resulting in the lady’s aloofness) and she rejects all four. The other women seeing that D, T, H and V all went for the blonde, immediately also reject the four Caballeros since the women do not want to be the second choice. So Dimitris, Tonester, Heckle and Vangelis, the loosers that they are, end up taking cold showers instead of hitting home runs.
scoring since anyone that knows anything about hitting on women in a bar realizes that the four girls being friends would be more open to dating four guys who are also friends since the goods are equally distributed in a secure way. So instead of acting independently, acting collectively would’ve resulted in a much more pleasurable night for all (even for the blonde babe since the last of the gang (ok this is a new variable that wasn’t introduced before; but hey we just opened up the Nash world to exogenous factors) Alfred P Neuman who came in late 
The business news of the week is that GM has hit a brick wall. GM and American car manufacturers have been going down 
GM was the leading US automaker for decades. Its leadership reflected the sign of the times in a postwar America (“What’s good for GM is good for America”). Some even say that GM, and the car industry in general, used various political maneuvers to gain the upper hand in a growing economy (using its clout to keep sabotage city transport in order to encourage purchases of new automobiles as well as building a time limit in its products so that they break down after 3 years, forcing you to buy a new one etc..). That may be so but the fact still remains that at one time, 
This kind of vision ran out of steam in the 70s and GM has been running on momentum since the late 70s early 80s. So the economic system hasn’t collapsed; its just that the times have caught up and surpassed the auto industry.
The chief ideology that brought about the present capitalist (or market) system goes by the name of 
Youth is a mosaic of images that generate impressions which form a composition matrix of one’s life.
Humanity has been searching for some sort of 
There’s an email going around that a well known powerhouse in the mobile communication world, a builder of mobile phones and platforms, is giving free laptops to those that forward twenty or more emails of the received letter. 
From the commission
enterprise could sell the pcs that did not include Intel processors (ex: only through the internet) including an agreement that delayed the offering of the products hosting competitor devices 6 months after the equivalent Intel product hit the market.
The French government is on its way to barring
entitled to have efficient and fluid protection when it comes to guarding their intellectual property. Granted!
So it is virtually impossible to catch someone ripping or illegally copying material without violating that someone’s right to privacy.
Video communicaton through fixed online applications has become very, very popular (ex: video skype). Video communication through telecommunication broadband systems has not become very popular (whether fixed or mobile).
To begin with, the UK is being summoned by the European Court for violation of information privacy, since a number of UK companies have been illegally accessing private data and usage habits, through a piece of software known as 
and eventually gains hold of the direction of the customer’s network, and of course of the most profitable components. Thus the concept of strategic network evolution.
For those returning to Athens Greece from a trip to Mexico, a trip that was realized in the last couple of weeks (last flight from Mexico to Athens was believed to be Friday the 24rth of April) and who fear, or have cause to fear, anything regarding the 
Aston
Trojans and Danaans etc..).
By now most people have heard of the Pirate Bay 
with drugs.
LONDON (
voice synthesizer, had been ill for a couple of weeks, with his condition deteriorating since he returned from a trip to the United States at the weekend, a source said.
He has previously been treated for pneumonia and the source said it appeared his latest illness was related to the chest infection, although he stressed there was no diagnosis yet.
George
decided that we had suffered enough, it relented, and the economy quickly bounced back. Your grandfather’s recession, on the other 
hand, was something like the 
housing plan announced this week looks good, in the sense that it will help many homeowners, but it won’t spur a new housing boom. What, then, will actually end the slump? Well, the 
grandfather’s recession. But recovery may be a long time coming. The closest 19th-century parallel I can find to the current slump is the recession that followed the 
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